Microinteractions convey system status, support error prevention, and communicate brand. They are initiated by a trigger, are single-purpose, and can make the experience engaging.
Universal icons are rare. To help overcome the ambiguity that almost all icons face, a text label must be present alongside an icon to clarify its meaning.
With every interaction, users must overcome the twin challenges of understanding the current state of a system and figuring out how to change it. Designers can support them by being aware of these gulfs and bridging them with a transparent conceptual model.
A generic Get Started call-to-action attracts clicks, but also misleads users and acts as a roadblock for those looking to get information about the company.
Interfaces that temporarily hide the UI elements to emphasize content often increase the interaction cost, cognitive load, and the number of attention switches.
Users are 37% faster at finding items within a list when visual indicators vary both in color and icon compared to text alone. If choosing between using color or an icon, icons with strong information scent perform better than color alone.
Decide whether and where to display thumbnails for list items based on the images’ importance relative to associated text, on whether images will be displayed for all list items, and on whether the small images are recognizably different from each other.
Selecting a precise value using a slider is a difficult task requiring good motor skills, even if the slider is well designed. If picking an exact value is important to the goal of the interface, choose an alternate UI element.
Accordions conserve space in mobile designs but they can also cause disorientation and too much scrolling. Easy design fixes improve the usability of these UI elements.
Events triggered via hover or click require distinct timing to avoid accidental activations and ensure that the user feels in control of the interface.
Moving elements are a powerful tool to attract users’ attention. When designing an animation consider its goal, its frequency of occurrence, and its mechanics.
On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio.
A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity.
