During the second day of SiliconAngle’s coverage at O’Reilly Fluent, we came across Dan Saffer, Director of Interactive Design at Smart Designs. He’s also an author and has recently published his fourth book, called Microinteractions. It talks about the  small pieces of functionality around the big features that designers tend to forget, though these said features can really make a huge difference about how customers feel about the product.

He furthered that in microinteraction, designers have to identify the functionality that people use all the time, draw out that functionality, and make it available as quickly as possible. Still, if people are using a lot of functionality, you can’t possibly bring out and create a shortcut button for each one of them because it will make the interface look complicated instead. There still lies a difference between “perceived simplicity and functional simplicity,” and being able to balance these two makes a great designer.

“A lot of people tend to think that if I nail these big features, that people will love my product but it’s actually not true,” says Saffer.  “People will tolerate your product, sure, it could be usable but it’s not necessarily be beloved unless you nail some of those key details.”

As an example to get his point across, Saffer cited turning off a phone ringer. People more or less do this 10 times a day. It’s not the kind of feature that will get the people to buy a phone, but it can make a huge difference in the user’s experience. With old phones, for instance, you have to go through 10 different levels of menus before you can finally turn the ringer down, but with smartphones today, you just have to flick one button.

See Saffer’s entire segment below.