Humanize micro-interaction
Using law of physic as a principle for designing digital motion
In the rural countryside of Lincolnshire 300 years ago, Isaac Newton attempted to learn about Kepler’s Laws, Galileo’s concepts, and the idea of planetary motion that he had learned in college. So on and so forth, until he discovered the relationship between motion and forces known as Newton’s three laws of motion.
The laws of physics have affected our activities and how we perceive everything in our physical and virtual spaces. Our virtual space, which has come a long way in a decade, has greatly benefited from the laws of physics in terms of creating our mental models.
Instead of discussing how to construct a great micro-interaction on our screen, this report will explore, abstractly, how the micro-interactions built into virtual space have a link with our behavior and mental models in physical space.
“Things don’t keep repeating themselves, but they rhyme.” We can quickly learn a lot about a situation if we can establish a mental model that fits with it.
Behavior, and Cognition
While discussing physical and virtual space, we must all decide where we are in space, where we want to go, and what we must do to achieve our goals. We will try to learn more about how behavior and cognition shape our expectations in virtual space.
Behavior: How we experience the physical world
Human interaction in physical space relies on 3D space and motion over time. These are the things that basic physics laws dictate are a part of our life.
Things that we are really familiar with are Newton’s First Law (the Law of Inertia).
If a good is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force.
The experience we gain from observing, learning, or experiencing makes us aware that an object has its weight, shape, and surface as attributes. Several factors influence an object’s movement, like gravitational force, frictional force, spring force, and so on.
The Law of Physics influences us to see how we expect the behavior of an object to behave, or we may say it Experiences Object Behavior, and we maintain it as a set of mental models.
We can easily predict that a ball dropped from a great height will continue to fall until it hits the bottom of the surface. We never expect the ball to fly and miss hitting the floor. It will seem strange, and we will be unable to accept that experience in our normal lives since it violates the laws of physics.
Cognition: How the experience impact our thought
Things we make contact with daily familiarize us with them. We may use them to quickly form a mental image of a situation, which creates a model that can be applied to similar situations in the future. These are known as mental models.
As Charlie Munger says in a speech at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School in 1994 titled “A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom as it Relates to Investment Management and Business,”
“What is elementary, worldly wisdom?
Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience (both vicarious and direct) on this latticework of models. “
Mental models describe how the world works. We can’t hold all of the world’s knowledge in our heads, so we use models to break the complicated down into manageable parts. They shape how we think, interpret, and respond.
Building the Micro-Interaction
Micro-interactions are a product’s functional and interactive features. They are the design, not simply details. Design that makes interacting with the product easier and more pleasant.
Micro-interaction is an essential aspect of the design since it is the smallest component of the visual space product. The key features would be surrounded by pain and frustration if the micro-interactions were bad and awkward. The basic laws of micro-interaction may be found in common items that we are familiar with.
For example, we use a toaster behavior to give a piece of information;
- A toaster does one thing; toast.
- It only has one use case; a user puts them to toast into a toaster and presses start.
- Toaster toast; toast pop up when done.
The basic activity of the toaster will appear to provide information about a process that has been completed. We never expect the toast to fly once the toaster pops it out, and we also never expect the information toast to bounce on our screen like a pinball game, feeling awkward and strange since we never expect that things will happen.
We can use analogical thinking to compare what we experience in virtual space to what we experience every day in physical space, which is connected to creating a tangible experience in virtual space.
If the rules of motion and force in physical space are already mentioned in the absolute law of physics, we also need rules to manage our virtual space in order to develop great micro-interactions based on our physical experience and mental models.
In physical space, we are familiar with moving objects as a result of past events, which has been explained in physics law. However, in virtual space, static elements must have a rule of motion to organize their motion.
We try to humanize the motions and bring them closer to real-life feelings by bending the laws of physics in virtual space. The rules of motion attempt to make it tangible and familiar, so that users do not feel strange when they experience it.
In the discussion of the rule of motion, many factors must be considered in order to make the micro-interaction experience feel tangible, such as the object’s weight, easing, or the progress of taking time to reach the final stop (which feels like the effect of gravitation in physical space), timing, pacing, and another factor that will influence how an object on our screen will change.
References
Whalen, H. (2019). Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products. O’Reilly.
Saffer, D. (2013). Microinteractions: Designing with Details. O’Reilly.
Weinberg, G., McCann, L. (2019). Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. Portfolio.
Parrish, S., Beaubien, R. (2019). The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts. Latticework Publishing Inc.
McLeod, R. (n.d.). Animation Handbook. Retrieved from https://www.designbetter.co/animation-handbook
