18 delightful examples of 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 improve customer 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 year or so and I couldn’t have complied it without excellent resources, especially 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.

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.”

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 😉

Gilt

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

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.

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.

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.

Google Hangouts

One word: /ponystream

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.’

MoMA

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

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.

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.

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.