Designing Subtle Delights into Your Product
Adding Context to Content with 3 Tweaks across 3 Apps
Over the last couple years, product builders have become more and more cognizant of how beautiful their products look and how thoughtful their product workflows are. Everyone strives to make their websites and apps look very polished using a combination of tried and true UI/UX standards & refreshing, bold decisions. The bold decisions could stem from innovating on business models (eg. Whale), user experience (eg. Slack), or design (eg. 60dB & Anchor).
In designing products, there are some things that are easily noticeable in plain sight. Some aren’t.They’re subtle. They serve as a good signal of how deeply the builders have through their product workflows and experience. Subtle things make products even more beautiful and natural.
Such subtle things take much more time, effort and thought to design and implement. But their impact on an average user might be disproportionately low. Users might not even notice the changes — or care. They might fail to appreciate the level of complexity and thinking involved.
Here’s one:
Caught that? See how Facebook designs the “Public” button in the status box. The globe icon within the button changes depending on what part of the world you are in.
Subtle beauty in apps we love
I save links from my Twitter feed to my Pocket using the iOS share sheet on a daily basis. Pocket saves not only the content of those links but also the tweet associated with that link. When I read articles in Pocket, the top portion of the screen displays what tweet that piece was associated with. It is designed in a very non-intrusive manner for the readers.
This gives me a lot of context on that article: It tells me who shared it, what the other person had to say about it, and a deep linked to the tweet so that I can respond contextually. These things might be more subtle than the obvious features of being able to save and read articles, but they really contribute a lot to the experience of power users. It’s artful design.
Nuzzel is yet another app that has embraced a lot of nuances in how it has designed it’s app. While Pocket gives some context on what a sharer of a link thinks about the content of the link, Nuzzel shows us what all the people in our Twitter network that shared a particular link think about an article.
This design decision enable users to get a sense of what their network thinks about a certain issue or topic.
Next up is Medium. I get a lot of links to Medium articles from Twitter. When I click on a link, a web view gets pulled up on Twitter’s mobile app. The color of “open in app” button on the bottom right corner of the web view matches the color theme of the publication the article belongs to. This is such a subtle yet fantastic product thinking, and a visual delight.
This goes to show how folks at Medium think about the overall user journey. The experience starts right there in the web view of someone else’s app.
These are just some of the subtle seeing choices that I come across and appreciate on a daily basis. This work needs to be admired and get inspired from. There is so much that could be learned about product design and development by just noticing and observing how such products evolve and make certain decisions at different stages of their lifecycle.
These products also go to show how they are not competing on features but on thoughtfulness. An average user might not be very observant of each of the subtle design choice. But, all these subtle things collectively make for a great user experience.
