Microinteractions: Designing with Details

An interesting read about the design of the smallest parts that make up all of our applications. Saffer explains the principles and rules for every microinteraction, and provides a vocabulary to talk about them. In the grand scheme of designing a large application, details like the ones described in the book are often overlooked, or deemed not important enough because of lack of budget or time. I believe the devil is in the details, and that having these details done right can contribute a lot to the application having a pleasant user experience (which entails more than just being easy to use), which will help with adoption.

The book does have a tendency to stretch the definition of a microinteraction, and call every interaction, or even a set of interactions, big or small, a microinteraction. It's also a kind of messy read: important principles are only italicized and are often drowning in a big chunk of text, without their own heading, and are hard or impossible to find again using the table of contents or the index. I'm going to have to write a summary for this.