If you have visited Give lately, you will have noticed some big changes. The core experience of the app — Gift giving and exploring Gifts — has been completely overhauled.

When we first designed the interface we made a lot of assumptions about what it should be. We used language as the means to express what you were supposed to do on the site.

The sentence based interaction that made up the core experience was very interface-centric. Much of what you interacted with were fabricated controls to help you perform this one simple workflow: giving a Gift to a musical artist you love. The unintended result was that it took too many steps to do what you were there to do.

Another side effect of this design was that all the Gifts from other fans and information about Verified Artists was hidden behind a panel. We have now made the interface less about itself and more about the content.

The removal of interface elements has given us the ability to create a beautiful, full screen search experience that activates as soon as you start typing. We want Giving to feel close, immediate and expressive.

We have also switched to a completely responsive website. While we always had a mobile version of Give, it used a different interface. This meant that we had to maintain two separate versions of the app.

Since we are a team of two, we are always looking for ways to improve our efficiency. Switching to a unified experience has greatly increased our ability to maintain the high level of user experience that we strive for. Now, whether you want to Give on your laptop, tablet, or mobile device, it is a familiar transaction, and one of the easiest on the web.