Microinteraction

Dan Saffer named the thing and then took it apart, which is why the word survived. A microinteraction has four parts. The trigger starts it, and is either something the person did or something the system noticed. The rules say what may happen, in what order, and what the interface refuses to do. The feedback is everything the rules make visible: the heart that pops, the count that ticks over, the tick of haptic on a phone. And the loops and modes are the long tail nobody budgets for, the part that decides what the same interaction does the second time, the hundredth time, and when the network is not there. Say those four words over any small piece of an interface and the missing one is usually obvious.

The scope is the useful part of the definition. A microinteraction is one task at one moment: like a post, mute a room, choose a size, dismiss a warning. It is not a flow and not a screen, and the moment it needs a second decision from the reader it has become something else. That boundary is what separates the term from animation in general. A page transition is motion in the service of navigation; a microinteraction may not move at all, because a rule that quietly refuses an invalid character is still the whole loop running. Motion is only the most visible way feedback gets delivered.

Most of the craft lands in the two middle parts. Rules are where an interaction stops lying: if a like is optimistic, the rule has to say what happens when the write fails, and the feedback for that failure is part of the same loop rather than a separate error screen. Feedback should be proportioned to the act, so a destructive step gets more of it than a routine one, and it should be cheap enough to survive repetition, since anything a person does forty times a day must not perform for them each time. The vocabulary for the individual pieces already exists on this site: the ripple and the state layer are feedback spellings, haptics are a channel, optimistic UI is a rule about time, and the toast is what the result says when the change happened somewhere the reader cannot see.

Treat the word as a budget line rather than as a compliment. Teams that say “add some microinteractions” at the end of a project are asking for decoration, and decoration is what they get. Teams that ask which trigger, which rules, what feedback, and what the loop does over time are using it as a checklist, and it is a good one: it catches the toggle with no pressed state, the field that validates only on submit, and the button that gives you nothing at all for the two seconds before the answer arrives.