10 July 2009
Little UX Touches that Go a Long Way
It’s always the little things that count. I recently noticed the download notification bar on the bottom right of Firefox 3.5. It tells you how many downloads are active, and roughly how long they’ll take to finish. The reason why this works is simple, it saves at least two clicks which it would normally take to bring up this download window:
This just shows how it’s important to pay attention to the small details in your app – it makes the life easier for your customers, thus increasing their loyalty to your app. Bam!
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Jon Rawlins
# July 10, 2009 - 12:25 pm
Agreed it’s the little touches that make things all seem worthwhile.
Ryan Carson
# July 10, 2009 - 12:25 pm
Thanks – glad you agree :)
Niki Brown | The Design O'Blog
# July 10, 2009 - 12:28 pm
Design is in the details :)
Tom
# July 10, 2009 - 12:31 pm
Had a little play on Safari 4 recently, and this was one of the make-or-break things that made me switch back to Firefox. Weird little things that you don’t really notice make up a large proportion of the usability of a program. The less I have to think about something, the better designed the program.
Scott
# July 10, 2009 - 12:35 pm
Firefox rocks… its always going to improve as it goes along as so many developers love it. It just shows even the small details are worth blogging about.
Joe
# July 10, 2009 - 1:23 pm
Are you aware that this blog is currently a bit broken in IE7?
Ryan Carson
# July 10, 2009 - 1:26 pm
@Joe – Yes, we’re uploading some fixes soon. Apologies about that.
Johan Svensson
# July 10, 2009 - 2:52 pm
I used to have an extension that did exactly that. Nice to see that the idea got implemented in the core codebase.
Chris
# July 10, 2009 - 4:04 pm
FYI, that download status has been around since at least firefox 3 – http://www.screencast.com/users/chrisofspades/folders/Jing/media/d6cf62d6-1808-43b6-b5cd-c63119011f32. but it is certainly a nice touch.
Nick Lindwall (Coolbox)
# July 10, 2009 - 4:24 pm
Yep, nice touch, I switched to firefox as my browser of choice only last year and haven’t looked back :)
Market Timing
# July 10, 2009 - 4:30 pm
I will always use FireFox now. I started using it about 2 years ago and I will never go back to IE. Although I like chrome as well, it seems to browse a bit faster then FireFox.
seventoes
# July 10, 2009 - 9:05 pm
What theme is that? It’s perdy.
Alex
# July 11, 2009 - 5:04 am
Um… what happened to think vitamin???
Ryan Carson
# July 11, 2009 - 3:57 pm
Hey Alex – we combined the Carsonified Blog and ThinkVitamin into one blog, which now lives at carsonified.com/blog. You can read more about it on this post.
Paul Nathan
# July 11, 2009 - 5:22 am
Yeah Scott, Firefox roxxx..lol…, I did tried every browser, but no one did satisfied me, the performance and internet experience that firefox do provide is Unique, one of the reason behind this may be its Open source, but i just loved it.
And yes you are true, i m working on many live projects currently such as Video conferencing, and it needs a minute special attention to make our customer happy, you are true buddy, a small attention to our application just add stars to it.
Thankyou for motivating everone
Koral
# July 11, 2009 - 11:28 am
thanks for it & i am totally agreed to you about this !
Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo
# July 11, 2009 - 1:25 pm
I think Opera does this better without adding extra chrome at the bottom. They show this info as the title of the download tab – which also saves the extra pop-up window.
Rob Mason
# July 13, 2009 - 8:28 am
Hasn’t it always told you what’s downloading and how long?
Ryan Carson
# July 13, 2009 - 8:32 am
Not sure. But that’s not the point – it’s a smart feature :)
Aaron Bassett
# July 14, 2009 - 9:02 am
2 Clicks?
Is it not easier to just hit CMD+J than to click about? Shortcut keys FTW! :)
But yeah it is nice to see this in 3.5, though I would have rather had even more CSS3 support.
Not that 3.5s’ support for CSS3 is bad compared to some browsers (like anything based on Trident) but it is still a bit behind Safari 4.
Derek Keith
# July 18, 2009 - 5:16 am
Yeah, I too am pretty sure this feature has been in Firefox since version 3. Yet, I do agree, the small things definitely do count.
Icon Library » Two clicks less on Firefox
# November 17, 2009 - 2:49 am
[...] improvement for granted and didn’t even notice that previous versions didn’t have it. Thanks to Ryan Carson for putting this slight UX touch into [...]