Starbucks, 37Signals and Small Changes
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.
