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Article 23

Little UX Touches that Go a Long Way

By @ryancarson

10 July 2009 | Category: User Science, UX

Screenshot of the download notification in Firefox

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:

Screenshot of the Firefox 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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Comments

  • http://www.jonrawlins.co.uk Jon Rawlins

    Agreed it’s the little touches that make things all seem worthwhile.

  • Ryan Carson

    Thanks – glad you agree :)

  • http://thedesignoblog.com Niki Brown | The Design O’Blog

    Design is in the details :)

  • Tom

    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.

  • http://www.techblast.co.uk Scott

    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

    Are you aware that this blog is currently a bit broken in IE7?

  • Ryan Carson

    @Joe – Yes, we’re uploading some fixes soon. Apologies about that.

  • http://atomicplayboy.net/ Johan Svensson

    I used to have an extension that did exactly that. Nice to see that the idea got implemented in the core codebase.

  • http://chrispeoples.com Chris

    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.

  • http://www.coolboxcreative.com/blog Nick Lindwall (Coolbox)

    Yep, nice touch, I switched to firefox as my browser of choice only last year and haven’t looked back :)

  • http://www.timingequity.com Market Timing

    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.

  • http://www.insomniaaddict.com seventoes

    What theme is that? It’s perdy.

  • Alex

    Um… what happened to think vitamin???

  • http://www.getlinkspro.com Paul Nathan

    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

  • http://www.eibmoz.net/irinapinball/index.php Koral

    thanks for it & i am totally agreed to you about this !

  • http://Designalized.com Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo

    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.

  • Ryan Carson

    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.

  • http://robmason.org Rob Mason

    Hasn’t it always told you what’s downloading and how long?

  • Ryan Carson

    Not sure. But that’s not the point – it’s a smart feature :)

  • http://aaronbassett.com Aaron Bassett

    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.

  • http://asmartpixel.com Derek Keith

    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.

  • http://icon-library.iconshock.com/technology/two-clicks-less-on-firefox/ Icon Library » Two clicks less on Firefox

    [...] 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 [...]

  • Ankush Kumkar

    yes it’s really cool and good thoughts

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