Getting engaged visitors to take a trip to your Australian Not-for-Profit’s online presence is hard enough. Keeping them on the page as long as possible or ensuring they have a positive memory of the experience is even more challenging.
One of the best ways to ensure the user experience with your online presence is as top-notch as it can be is to utilise microinteractions. Everything from a satisfying swipe after seeing a piece of content or animation that delights the reader helps build relationships that encourage future engagement.
What are Microinteractions?
A microinteraction on your website aims to make the user’s journey that much more rewarding. They are subtle cues and interactions that elevate a website, making it feel a little extra intuitive and responsive to human needs. They are the elements that improve user engagement within a digital website or platform. Some of the more common include:
- Feedback Microinteractions: A visual or audio cue that tells a user an action has taken place as a result of their interaction. That could be something like a button changing colours when pressed or a “ding” when a message is sent via a contact form.
- Control Microinteractions: These are the features that give users more power over how they interact with your NFP’s website. Maybe you have a slider that tells a story or a toggle option for night and day time colour schemes.
- Emotional Microinteractions: As the name suggests, these features pull on your target audience’s heartstrings through things like personalised greetings or whimsical sounds that add a human element to your online presence.
Think of microinteractions as tiny little extras. Things such as the mint on the pillow of your favourite hotel room bed or the charging cable allowing you to recharge your mobile device when taking a ride-sharing service. They elevate the experience from good to great.
Why Should You Integrate Microinteractions in Web Design?
A challenge every Australian organisation has is to build trust with the target audience. When you have a digital platform like a website, you try to break the communication barrier of human to digital presence. You need to humanise that experience as much as possible to make it feel more authentic.
Every microinteraction you provide transforms how users see and view your content. It reduces friction through subtle interactive elements that make a complex relationship feel smoother or easier to enjoy.
Companies like Apple do this all of the time. They have entire teams of user engagement specialists testing out everything from pulling down on a browser screen to refresh the page to what noise the device makes when you unlock the screen. The more these elements feel natural and easy, the higher the engagement.
Design Tips for Microinteractions on Your NFP Website
Finding ways to cultivate more microinteractions on your website is a blend of art and science. You need to adhere to some simple principles to get the job done right. While every site design will be unique, some basic principles include:
- Consistency: You want a coherent and intuitive visitor experience. All the various cues or interactive elements across your site must be roughly the same so users can quickly understand how they work and feel comfortable exploring your content.
- Branding: Your microinteractions should reflect your brand identity. It should meet user expectations by visualising or interacting with colours, content, and other elements aligned with your overall brand personality.
- Balancing: Try to strike a balance between simple micro-interactive design and creativity. They need to be easy enough to understand but fun enough, so they add a more human element to your website’s interactivity.
Put another way, keep things simple – keep things fun. Think about the thumbs up when you “like” a Facebook post or the way a message in your inbox stops being bold after it is read. The microinteractions you utilise need to fit into your overall theme in a way that “pluses” the user experience.
User Satisfaction: The Gold Standard of Microinteractions
The only way to tell if the microinteractions on your nonprofit website are succeeding is to get user feedback. You need to measure the impact of your different interactive elements to ensure users are truly satisfied.
To do this, you’ll have to do a little A/B testing. You can also conduct user surveys or have a “Beta-test” group that tests out different microinteractions before you “go live” with your new website, page, form, or other elements.
An excellent example of this testing is the integration of AR (augmented reality) into modern websites in ecommerce. Shops are testing out ways for users to virtually try on clothing or test out how a new lamp would look in their home through AR interactions. The microinteractions come after the AR is used, as the process of leveraging that technology must translate into purchases, contact forms, or other shop engagement.
Wrapping Up
Wrapping your head around microinteractions doesn’t have to be a complex conversation. As long as you’re putting forward those little benefits your target audience will appreciate, you are helping your NFP grow in engagement like new volunteers, donors, or clients.
Our experienced team at Web 105 can help. We have professional website designers and developers capable of integrating fun, easy-to-understand microinteractions that make your NFP website stand out from the rest. We have worked with Australian healthcare providers, government agencies, and nonprofits for years and can bring that expertise to your online presence. Give us a call today, and let’s discuss your future website needs.
FAQs
What is an example of a microinteraction design?
That little “ding” you hear when a new email arrives in your Google email is the perfect example of a microinteraction built into web design.
What is the principle of microinteractions?
While this varies by industry, in website design a microinteraction is where a user triggers an event or element that offers an interactive response to improve the user experience.
How do you create a microinteraction?
Most website-building software or professional teams will do common microinteractions intuitively. The best teams, like ours at Web 105, will take the time after the design process to infuse more microinteractions to enhance the user experience.