11 Product Related Micro Terms
World has been fragmented and our time has been sliced. In the tech world, products are optimized for all sorts of micro-segments from product design to copy writing, from implementation to marketing. Being Micro enables us to empathize, prototype, and develop the product flow in a whole new perspective. During past readings, I have come across a handful of intriguing terms that started with Micro. And I believe it’s meaningful to collect and understand these micro-minds.
Micro-Interaction 🍻
Micro-interactions are trigger-feedback pairs in which the trigger can be a user action or an alteration in the system’s state; the feedback is a narrowly targeted response to the trigger and is communicated through small, highly contextual (usually visual) changes in the user interface.
In his book Microinteractions, Dan Saffer describes the structure of Micro-interaction as below:
Micro-Animation 🏇🏻
In the digital product context, Micro-Animation plays a crucial part of micro-interaction and largely increases the usability and desirability of the product. The difference is that Micro-Animation is mainly about visual feedback while Micro-Interactions could be the haptic, audio or even other sensory without the role of the visual.
Micro-Tasking 🤹🏻♂️
“When we’re on mobile, we’re micro-tasking, we’re local and we’re probably bored.”
Josh Clark, the author of Tapworthy — Designing Great iPhone Apps, offers three categories for mobile web access one of them is Micro-tasking. He describes: when users interact with their devices for brief but frenzied periods of activity. It could be a quick note about a birthday present idea while commuting, a sudden slo-mo shot when your friend blows out the candle during the party, or checking bus connection just before saying goodbye to your friends.
Micro-Moment ⏰
Google has been the evangelist of Micro-Moment ever since 2015. In Google’s guidebook, it is described as critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, micro-moments ultimately determine how that journey ends.
Google uses 3 dimensions to illustrate how micro-moments influence our choices and in turn help us make decisions. summarizes the moments that matter to brand and experience in 4 categories, which nicely covers the full range of user needs.
Micro-Copy ✍️
Micro-copy is the tiny chunk of texts that help users understand the context, function or consequences. Typically it appears next to the buttons, in the tooltips, alerts and so forth. It brings ease, trust and positive impact for the users. These warmhearted copies display elegant, considerate, helpful essence of the product, in turn helping conversion and build positive user usability and impressions.
Micro-Typography
Micro-Typography is detailed manipulation of text in order to improve legibility, readability, scannability, comprehension. In principle it entails all the typography terms like kerning, tracking, leading, glyph, punctuation, spacing etc. Here I listed three Micro-Typography aspects, namely spacing, responsiveness of text, and eyebrow headlines.
Micro-Commitment 💍
In Growth.design GEM019 newsletter, I came across the concept of Micro-Commitment when it analyzed the contextual Linkedin alert of a particular connection before the app notification alert smashing on face like many other apps. For me the micro-commitment is to contextually deliver and nudge them to commit more without overwhelming force them to make the big decision. Micro-Commitment reflects the Foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique, which is a compliance tactic that aims at getting a person to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first.
Micro-Conversion 🧲
Micro-Conversion are the metrics teared down from one or more key performance indicators that measure the core purpose of a product. Since the user actions of macro-conversion may happen rarely, it makes a lot of sense to measure some small milestones conversions that may potentially cause the significant conversion.
Micro-Services 🛎
Micro-services is a software development technique — a variant of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) structural style — that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In a micro-services architecture, services are fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight. from Wikipedia
Micro-Frontend ⌨️
The term Micro Frontends first came up in ThoughtWorks Technology Radar at the end of 2016. It extends the concepts of micro services to the frontend world. The current trend is to build a feature-rich and powerful browser application, aka single page app, which sits on top of a micro service architecture. from Michael Geers
Micro-Influencer 🔥
Micro-influencer is the brands partner with individuals who have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers on social media. They are typically well-known in their particular area of interest and have very high rates of engagement from their audiences. Brands can extend their reach in niche areas by pursuing micro-influencers.
Conclusion 🔬
“No miles without accumulation of steps, no rivers without accumulation of streams.” Hsun-Tzu
Excellent products stand out by taking special attention on these micro aspects during the whole development phase and user journey: understand users’ micro-moments, facilitate their micro-tasking, use micro-copy to nudge them, allow micro-commitment in exchange for micro-conversion, apply micro-animation and micro-interaction enabled by micro-frontend and extended micro-service and finally let community micro-influencers thrive.
