Small changes can have big impact on the user experience of a product. There's no doubt there. Making small tweaks to existing products is the sign of a team that cares about the user experience and is engaged with their product. I can't stand products that are stagnant whether they are physical or digital.
Here are two recent small changes that had big impact:
1. Starbucks Lid Plugs
We've all been there: walking down the street with our fresh coffee and blamo... burnt hand. It sucks. Up until now I accepted this as simple fact of life and tried my best to hold the cup steady.
Starbucks spent some time thinking about this problem and now offers lid plugs. I love it! A super simple solution that makes my day better. What more can you ask for?
2. Basecamp Project Switcher
I'm a long time Basecamp user and love the product. Although most of the app is set up for ease and speed of use, switching between projects has always been a hassle. It isn't a hassle until your account has lots of projects setup. Essentially you have a list of all projects categorized by the client. If a client has many projects, the list becomes very noisy.
As an employee, I only ever access a few projects at any given point in time. I don't need a list of the entire company's projects; I need a list of my current projects. So that's exactly what they did. They redesigned the switcher to give you immediate access to the 5 most recently accessed projects and left the rest of the projects in a drop down menu.
Immediately the noise is dropped from tens of projects to no more than five. And, the five that are presented are the projects that I am most likely to switch to. Since the redesign, I've noticed that I rarely ever use the full drop down list. The redesign, although simple, makes Basecamp more of a joy to use.
Sometimes we like to jump to the really complex solutions without considering making small changes first. If you find yourself in this case, try to find a simple solution to a small problem, then worry about the big changes. Sometimes they'll solve themselves before you even get to them.
I have been hoping for this for a while now. I really want a way to sync all of my contacts online with my devices and computers and it looks like we may be one step closer to that with the release of the Google Contacts API today.
From Google:
The Google Contacts Data API allows you to own your own contact data. We expect the API to be useful for a big range of applications. For example, developers can use it to:
- Import a user's Google contacts into their web or desktop application
- Export their application's contact list to Google
- Write sync applications for mobile devices or popular, desktop-based contact management applications
Hopefully the API works well and starts to get integrated into software. I can't wait to have a single source of contact information.
Through: ReadWriteWeb
So by now most of you have heard about Google Gears. If not here's the deal:
"Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline."
Google Gears is a fully functioning relational database that lives within a browser plugin and gives programmers access to it to it's structure. This allows for off-line editing of data and post-off-line syncing.
So the question is: What does Google Gears mean for Interaction Designers who design web applications?
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Adaptation is an essential feature of the human psychological make up. It allows us to become comfortable with seemingly impossible situations and move forward together as a species. We can adapt to difficult situations which allow us to spend more time concentrating on how to make our current situation better. The flip side of this coin is also true: we adapt to good experiences.
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Luke Wroblewski wrote a piece over at UX Matters on the topic of Selection-Dependent Inputs. In short, these are forms that have fields that depend on a choice made previously in the form. Luke goes on to give 8 solutions/patterns for this type of UI problem. While the solutions are good, it got me thinking about good experiences that I have had with forms.
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As you may have already heard or read about, USA Today has redesigned their site and incorporated many new social features. I can only imagine what the design teams went through to push these new features out the door.
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Saturday, February 10, 2007
Wanna figure out your user experience stats?
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Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Assuming that your not sick of reading about the iPhone, Bruce Tognazzini has posted a great article (The iPhone User Experience: A First Look) looking at the history behind the UI of the device.
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Thursday, January 11, 2007
Todd Warfel has started a series on creating documentation with InDesign and Illustrator called Wireframing With InDesign and Illustrator. This is a method that I have been testing out for the past few months and I have to say that I love it.
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Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Since beginning my look at the mobile web, and the products used to access it, I have found one common theme: UI Laziness.
UI laziness is when products or services remove functionality because it seems difficult to design on a small screen. Or when interfaces are difficult to use, and it is blamed on small screen. Or any other problems to the UI when it is blamed on some other circumstance. It basically means that the designers (this includes anybody who is involved in producing the product, even people who's titles may not include "design") have come up with an easy solution just because it's easy, not because it's better.
This bothers me.
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