Thursday 7 April 2016

The Joy of Micro UX: 18 delightful examples

What is micro-UX?

Micro-UX refers to the tiny interactions with a website or app that are designed to delight the user, by making their digital interactions easier, more engaging and ultimately human.

Providing a good user experience is so vital to keeping visitors glued to your sites and products, and many of these animations or simple pieces of copy can really help engender a feeling of loyalty. Revealing that your brand actually has a personality and really cares about the human at the other end.

This is a list of just some of my favourites that I’ve discovered over the last 12 months, and I couldn’t have complied it without these excellent resources: Little Big Details and BrianLovin.com.

Royal Mail’s Postcode Finder

Find an address by typing your postcode into the search box, and watch as the drop down menu reveals a scrollable list of all possible options as you type.

royal mail postcode finder

AO.com

AO has tonnes of brilliant UX features, but this is really clever… If you highlight the name of a product in order to copy and paste it, AO knows what you’re doing and says “we price match.”

ao.com price match

MailChimp

If you high-five the monkey’s paw too much when your campaign is in the send queue, it goes red, and THEN if you click again it opens up MailChimp’s surprisingly addictive Fast Fives game. Go on, click it, you’ve earned a break. I won’t tell anyone ;)

Secret

As Brian Lovin points out on his excellent blog Designer Details, there’s lots of great photo animations on the Secret, including the subtle way the image remains while scrolling through the comments…

secret

Gilt

The luxury retailer fills in popular domains when you enter your email address.

gilt form

Google search – popular times

When you search for restaurants, Google provides you with a handy visualisation on its busiest times and highlights the current time.

google listings

Rough Trade

Instead of adding to a bag or cart, on the Rough Trade site you can drag a record up to a ‘shelf’ so you can see all your lovely vinyl throughout your crate-digging.

rough_trade

AV Club

Many publishers do something similar, but here’s AV Club’s subtle indicator at the top of the page that tells you how much of the article you’ve read.

av club indicator

Google Hangouts

One word: /ponystream

google hangouts chat ponies

There are other easter eggs too… woot!!, LMAO!!, /pitchforks and my personal favourite – Use your cursor and press: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, and then hit Enter.

Spotify – Star Wars playlists

If you listen to a song uploaded by the official Star Wars channel on the Spotify desktop app, the time remaining bar turns into a lightsaber.

star wars lightsaber

Airbnb

Airbnb has tonnes of awesome UX features, but I particularly like how the price tags for each location are greyed-out when you’ve looked at the place already.

airbnb-bad

Amazon

Amazon has a myriad of ways it uses to retain its customers, included respecting your privacy. The emails below all say the product name of the purchased items, apart from the one with the product number, which is a sex toy.

amazon anonymous

Automattic

If you’ve looked at the same role available on Automattic’s jobs page more than a few times, it offer this encouraging little pop-up…

Automattic jobs page

Timehop

I love this cheeky little message from the social app that invites you to share social posts from your past… ‘looks like “someone” is trying to get a job in politics.’

timehop

MoMA

On the MoMa site, if you leave a comment, the Captcha tool is based on a piece of artwork from the collection.

moma blog captcha

ASOS

When you sign-up to ASOS.com, when you fill in your date of birth, it tells you how many sleeps till your birthday.

Join ASOS

Mondo

In order not to distract from the artwork and create a nice clutter free page, Mondo only reveals the price and add to cart buttons when you hover over the products.

mondo

Google Chrome

And finally, my very favourite secret thing on the whole of the internet. If you lose internet connection while you’re on Chrome, did you know that you can play a platform game with the little dinosaur by pressing your space-bar? It’s totally worth switching off your Wi-Fi off for.

chrome dinosaur game


The article The Joy of Micro UX: 18 delightful examples was first seen from https://searchenginewatch.com

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