Microinteractions

Chapter 1. Designing Microinteractions

“Nothing big works.”

—Victor Papanek

The furious shouting started after the conductor stopped the performance. The New York Philharmonic had reached the very end of the slow, quiet Adagio movement that finishes Mahler’s Symphony no. 9. The audience, many of whom had paid hundreds of dollars for this privilege, sat attentive and rapt, listening to the still, sublime moments that resolve over an hour of music.

And then it happened: from the front row, the unmistakable sound of an iPhone’s “Marimba” sound—that high-pitched xylophone tinkle—going off over and over again. An alarm. It kept going. And going. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, halted the orchestra. But the alarm kept going off. By now, audience members were yelling at the phone’s owner, an older executive the Philharmonic later dubbed “Patron X,” a long-time symphony patron. Avery Fisher Hall, which just moments before had been unearthly calm and quiet, had erupted in chaos and anger.

As the New York Times reported in January 2012,^[1] Patron X had just gotten the iPhone the day before; his company had replaced his Blackberry for it. Before the performance began, he had flipped the mute switch, turning silent mode on. But what he didn’t know was that one of the iPhone’s rules was that alarms still go off even when the phone is silenced. So when the alarm went off, he didn’t even realize it was his phone for an excruciatingly long time. By the time he knew it was his phone and had turned the ...