Microinteractions: Full Color Edition

Preface

Dan Saffer

What Is This Book About?

Microinteractions are all around us, from the turning on of an appliance to logging in to an online service to getting the weather in a mobile app. They are the single use-case features that do one thing only. They can be stand-alone apps or parts of larger features. The best of them perform with efficiency, humor, style, and an understanding of user needs and goals. The difference between a product we love and a product we just tolerate are often the microinteractions we have with it.

This book dissects microinteractions in order to help readers design their own. Starting with a model of microinteractions, each chapter closely examines each part of the model, and provides guiding principles to get the most out of every microinteraction. By doing so, your products will improve and your users will enjoy using them more, building customer (and brand) loyalty.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who cares about making better products, particularly digital products. Designers of all stripes, developers, researchers, product managers, critics, and entrepreneurs will hopefully find much to think about, use, and emulate here.

This book is especially for anyone who has struggled to convince their client, developers, the product or project managers that this small thing is really worth doing, that it’ll make the product so much better. Now that small thing has a name—microinteractions—and can be argued for more effectively.

How This Book ...