PC LOAD LETTER?

April 9, 2010 11:30 AM

What are some examples of tiny user interface changes that had a huge effect on usability?

(or even just how much people liked something)?

posted by dmd to Computers & Internet (36 answers total)

Best answer: At work, we have a process that involves lining up just enough business for each day. The system we developed to manage this has a sort of status display with a traffic light for each day, showing whether or not we've booked enough orders for that day.

Us IT folks are used to the convention "green=good, red=bad" so we had it show a red light for "not enough orders" and a green light for "enough orders". The user community for this application found this display completely baffling and could not make sense of it.

Then we figured out it's because they are using the "green=go (book more orders), red=stop (busy enough, stop getting more orders)" convention. So we reversed the sense of the traffic light and suddenly the status display was deemed wonderful!
posted by FishBike at 11:37 AM on April 9, 2010 [5 favorites]

Not exactly a change, but a small difference that makes all the difference in usability:

At stores where they have those little screens for you to electronically sign your credit card - one brand of them has the buttons immediately below the screen, so the base of your hand accidentally presses the "OK" or "cancel" button when you are signing your name. Other brands have them at the top, or moved farther down so they are not in the way.
posted by CathyG at 11:40 AM on April 9, 2010

The first time I used a scroll wheel on a mouse was pretty big.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:47 AM on April 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

The simple design of the iPhone. There's no endless burrowing through menus to get to the app I want. I just flick my finger across the screen then press a part of it. Compare that to any of the phone interface designs which came before it. (Windows Smartphones were halfway there, but still pretty clunky).
posted by Biru at 11:49 AM on April 9, 2010

Here's an example of the other side of things.

At a gas station nearby, the buttons for "CREDIT HERE", "CREDIT INSIDE" and so on are just little membrane buttons on the surface of their new pumps.

Unfortunately, they are directly next to the number pad, so when you want to select CREDIT HERE, you mash the "1", because, hey, that's actually a button. The screen changes to an animated clock, but nothing else happens. So after a minute, you try it again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Then the clerk inside comes on the speaker to set you right.

They finally had to post signs on each pump explaining that the number keys don't actually do anything, please press the yellow label to the left of the button.

...which signs, by the way, are how I knew I wasn't the only one.
posted by jquinby at 11:58 AM on April 9, 2010

Best answer: Luddite answer: people had been holding the cello between their knees for more than a century before François Servais developed and popularized the use of the endpin. With the bulk of the instrument´s weight supported by the floor, players were far more free to navigate the instrument. Most of the last 100ish years´repertoire for the instrument would be incredibly ungainly, if not entirely unplayable, without this little pokey piece of metal.
posted by dr. boludo at 11:58 AM on April 9, 2010 [16 favorites]

I think the iphone interface isn't one small interface innovation but a collections of dozens of new or at least nontraditional ideas, both big and small. It certainly can't be described as "tiny."

I really liked the grouping of programs on the Windows taskbar in the post-XP versions. It's a small change that it really missed on the (rare) occasions that I have to use Windows 2000, 98 or 95.
posted by The Lamplighter at 12:01 PM on April 9, 2010

Here's an example on how just using a simple format change appears to increase customer response rate significantly...

Frivolous" changes, such as the "Mad Libs" form style, that can increase response rates 25 to 40 percent.
LukeW | "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%

Basically, instead of the standard sterile form,
First name:
Last name:
email:
comments:

They used a narrative form:
Hello. My name is ___ ___. I am interested in the ____.
Oh, and by the way my email is ____.
posted by crenquis at 12:05 PM on April 9, 2010 [7 favorites]

Bringing the controls for turn signals, wipers, the radio, etc. from the dash to the steering column was a big deal. It may not seem like much, but signaling a turn and canceling it while shifting and turning takes either some careful timing or three hands.
posted by cjemmott at 12:15 PM on April 9, 2010

Tabbed browsing was huge for me and, I'd expect, most people. It really is a very tiny thing but it completely revolutionized the way I surf the web.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 12:19 PM on April 9, 2010 [6 favorites]

The $300 million dollar button. An e-commerce site made registration optional, which increased sales by a lot. But arguably not a pure UI change, since it's really about whether something is optional or required.

37Signals changed the wording of a button from "Sign up for a free trial" to "See Plans & Pricing" and doubled sign-ups. Arguably a language change, not a UI change.
posted by AlsoMike at 12:20 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Google (and other companies with large numbers of users) often sees fairly significant results from small changes. Not everybody likes designing that way.
posted by feckless at 12:23 PM on April 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Seconding tabbed browsing (and tabs in general). Firefox came out the year after I graduated from grad school. I can't imagine how much easier school would have been had I not needed dozens of windows open at a time.
posted by coolguymichael at 12:25 PM on April 9, 2010

Best answer: In Windows 95, the Start button was surrounded by a 1 pixel border, so that if you just slammed the cursor all the the way down on the lower left and clicked you'd hit that border and nothing would happen. Subsequent versions of Windows enlarged the button by a pixel, making the menu accessible by a much less precise mousing operation.
posted by contraption at 12:26 PM on April 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's important to keep in mind that seeing analytics changes immediately after an interface change sometimes just indicates that you...changed something.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:30 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Drag-down to refresh in Tweetie, an iPhone Twitter app. It's a small thing, a completely unobtrusive new feature, but I now expect it in other apps (and they don't have it! ARGH!).
posted by Songdog at 12:39 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Dammit, I made that little self-deprecating [/pedant] thing but of course I used actual html and it got swallowed. I AM SELF-DEPRECATING.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:01 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Not computer-related, but: When Interfaces Kill.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 1:13 PM on April 9, 2010

Not computer related, but when Fisher Price made their pull toy strings shorter ( a safety issue), While it was still a good length for toddlers to pull the toys adults had a very difficult time. So a whole generation of kids were deprived of seeing mommy or daddy pulling a chatter telephone.
posted by Gungho at 1:20 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

In Windows 3.x there was no dedicated "close window" button, but you could double-click on the window's icon in the upper left corner (you still can, fyi.) Win95 introduced that little X in the upper right corner which I think was a big advance, because closing a window is arguably one of the most common tasks you perform, and since single-clicking the upper-left icon brings up a menu of options there was no way to discover that double-click meant close without just knowing about it or accidentally trying it which is generally bad UI.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:21 PM on April 9, 2010

I remember when Windows 95 came out. I'd been using 3.1, and it always seemed obvious to me that Open and Save dialog boxes were the pits. Clearly they needed some way to give quick access to commonly used folders.

So when I got a Windows 95 machine, I can remember how happy I was to see the pane of shortcuts on the left side. I immediately selected my projects folder, dragged it over ... and was flabbergasted to find you couldn't put your own folders there; only the ones Microsoft decided you needed. To me, that's always epitomized the Microsoft experience.
posted by Alaska Jack at 1:50 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Alaska Jack writes "I immediately selected my projects folder, dragged it over ... and was flabbergasted to find you couldn't put your own folders there; only the ones Microsoft decided you needed. To me, that's always epitomized the Microsoft experience."

FYI I can customize this list. It's a fairly simple registry change that was "supported" in TweakUI. Stupid that it wasn't built in though.
posted by Mitheral at 2:16 PM on April 9, 2010

FYI I you can customize this list. holy crap how Nelson was that typo
posted by Mitheral at 2:20 PM on April 9, 2010

Auto-complete can greatly improve text boxes.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:27 PM on April 9, 2010

Aside from tech examples, there's also the Urinal Bee, which reduced "spillage" by 80% when it was first introduced at Schiphol Airport. Yes, the Urinal Bee was invented by someone on the custodial staff responsible for cleaning the men's room.
posted by chengjih at 2:44 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, there was also a change in the power window switches in cars. Before, they were rocker switches: rock one way, and the window goes down, rock the other way and it goes up. This caused problems when toddlers and dogs would stand on the armrest and stick their heads an open window. If they stepped on the wrong part of the rocker switch, the window would go up, causing injury/strangulation.

Now, power window switches require you to pull up to make the window go up, which solves that problem.
posted by chengjih at 2:47 PM on April 9, 2010 [3 favorites]

Making a user's dialog box choices sticky, so whatever they chose last time is the default next time.
posted by ottereroticist at 2:51 PM on April 9, 2010

The infinite corner: For reasons impossible to fathom, the "start" button on Windows used to stop one pixel short of the corner. You had to hit the middle of the button to activate it; if you pushed the mouse pointer into the corner, that wasn't considered part of the button.

Later they changed that. In current versions of Windows, the button includes the corner pixel, which makes it easier to activate.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:17 PM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Easier access to data is always huge. I find the keyword-ability in Firefox to be a boon - "wp " in the toolbar, for example, gets me a results page on wikipedia as if I queried "" at Wikipedia itself. While I only use wp and imdb often, it's great.

While converting an old green screen medical system into a GUI, we found that most of the time a user would start their workflow by loading a patient's account. The only way to do this in the old system (and, indeed, our new system at the onset) was by typing the patient account into the entry box, or by searching by patient name, address, etc. The search screen was a dedicated form, which interrupted the workflow. We ended up adding the ability to enter an encounter number (id that the insurance company associates with a claim) in the patient account field prefixed by an 'e' and the system would load the account associated with that encounter. Ditto for transactions (payments) and, finally, we added a quick-search for transaction notes (which is where the user often entered, say, the check number when a patient paid with a check). These changes were greatly appreciated by our customer base, had an enormous effect on the speed that users could complete tasks, and the changes were simple and small, in comparison to many of the other features we added.
posted by mbatch at 3:55 PM on April 9, 2010

whoops.. "wp " in my first line above should read "wp {topic}"
posted by mbatch at 3:56 PM on April 9, 2010

Up until the invention of the first Web browser, there was no such thing as a universal "Back" button. Going back to the previous screen in an app required a different command, menu choice or button in each program. The combination of the invention of links and the back button made it much easier to navigate and explore any application or content on a computer screen.

Today, the iPhone breaks this a bit because there's no standard place for a "Back" button in each of the apps -- sometimes on the top bar, sometimes on the bottom bar, and it often has different labels other than "Back". That's one of my criticisms of the iPhone interface.
posted by lsemel at 4:25 PM on April 9, 2010

I've recently upgraded to Office 2007 at work. I used it at home already so I know where everything is and I like the layout in general. But before when I wanted something in a menu I moved the cursor to the top of the screen, clicked on the menu, dragged down to the thing and released the mouse button when what I wanted was selected. Now I have to drag the cursor up, click and release on the menu I want to open that ribbon, drag the cusor over to the option I want, then click again on the option I'm after (often with more dragging and selecting as smaller dropdowns appear). The extra clicking and dragging is actually enough that my arm is getting sore. It's a tiny change in workflow but I was already only just managing my OOS issues, this is enough to throw it over the edge. Plus it just takes longer having that extra step, and I use all kinds of stuff in many menus and ribbons and whatever so it adds up.

I'll likely adapt, making more use of keyboard shortcuts and right click menus while putting more things into the quickwhatever tool bar etc. But the adaption will never make it as fast or easy as before because I do too many different things. There was no reason for the change, I get no benefit from the extra dragging around of the mouse, and I'm really surprised at how bad it ends up being when I use this software all the time.
posted by shelleycat at 5:24 PM on April 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Cellphones used to have a "Send" button you needed to click to end the call.
posted by xammerboy at 5:39 PM on April 9, 2010

Best answer: Once upon a time, people used to forget their card at an ATM because the machine would spit the card out after the money had been dispensed. They would take their cash and leave, and then the card would pop out.

Changing things so the card came out first, and then the money, saved a lot of people a lot of stress.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 4:10 AM on April 10, 2010 [3 favorites]

Most TV remotes have a tiny, but noticeable "tit" on the "5" button, to help you orient the number pad with you fingers in a dark room, and most follow the U.S. telephone dial number layout, not the once king-of-the-hill adding machine keypad number layout.
posted by paulsc at 9:57 AM on April 10, 2010

[edit this]

thus, the Age of Wiki's commenced
posted by chalbe at 3:53 PM on April 10, 2010