As mentioned in Art Direction immersive design takes storytelling to another level, outside of the regular book, because a digital product can make it so much better. This is with the help of animations, visual effects, audio, videos and much much more.
The feedback the user gets from an experience on a website increases the user experience, and it makes it more pleasant and interesting.
As I mentioned previously, animations and interactions are a big factor.
For a very long time, Static pages were the most common website there was, which means that they’re at a standstill, e.g. no animations and the entire page load at the same time, whilst dynamic pages, which can load at different times and feel more alive and immersive has over the past few years began to take over.
Another piece of making a website more immersive is the micro/macro-interactions, and while they don’t seem super important, more like a nice visual effect, it does a lot for the end user. By adding micro-interactions it increases the user experience as well. Not only does it look nice, but it also indicates that the website is working. Making the user feel a part of the experience, that the user potentially will remember.
Feedback has always been important when interacting with media, especially online because there needs to be an indication that the feature works as intended. Like apple did when they began with touch, to add button sounds and vibrations to the experience when using the phone keyboard, to make the experience more immersive.
One of the more popular micro-interactions today is the micro-interaction when you chose to react to content on the Facebook website. They made the like more personal, and more interesting and gave it a soul.
That means that the user's expectations are higher than ever before when it comes to creating a website, which is why a lot of companies move to this design trend. It is now almost expected that images load at different times
If we make a comparison, a website that makes you feel like a part of it would attract more users and have them coming back, especially if it’s a social media website or e-commerce website, by making the experience more fun, while on the other hand, a website that is static and has little to no micro interactions might feel more like a chore.