Jason Fried, giving a preview of the all-new calendar in Basecamp Next:

There is one thing in particular I love about this calendar. Instead of the standard month-at-a-time view, it shows the next 6 weeks. You can see the current week and 5 weeks into the future. It’s one of those things that is so incredibly obvious once you see it. Why doesn’t every calendar do this?

Calendars are primarily future-oriented. We care about what is scheduled to occur, or what is happening now. You may on occasion need to find the date of something in the past, but that is relatively rare. Yet, at the end of the month, we have to deal with the noise of over three weeks of past events.

Unlike their paper predecessors, computer calendars aren’t static, pre-printed a year at at time. They should take advantage of the fact they can dynamically update the interface based on the current date, and adapt to our needs. There is no reason they need be stuck on rigid day/week/month boundaries.

I noticed yesterday that Chrome no longer displays a “+” inside of the new tab button.

Above: the new tab button for the previous versions of Chrome on the left and the new tab button on the right.

At first, I thought it was a bug. I quit and restarted Chrome with the same results. I tweeted about it and quickly got a few confirmations that it’s not an issue just on my computer, but a recent change in Chrome, and a few other people thought it was a bug as well.

I’m all for continually refining and simplifying your user interface, but this change makes no sense to me. For a new user, there is no context or hints as to the purpose of the button, not even a tooltip. For existing users, it looks like something is broken. No space was saved as the button is the same size, and I don’t even think it’s a visual improvement as the button is now just leaf-like blob floating there. I can’t think of another interface where there is a button that is completely devoid of any text or icons to give some clues to its function.

Luckily, since Chrome is open-source, we can gain at least a little insight into the decision behind this change. I dug up this fairly long thread, in which almost every commenter explains they thought it was a bug or glitch. Almost everyone also preferred the old button, and wanted the change reverted. I couldn’t find a real reason the change was made, but we do get what seems like a very Google justification from someone on the Chromium team:

User experience research on our end seems to have confirmed that this change does not decrease usability and in fact can lead to an overall improvement in people’s perceptions of the UI (some participants described the change as “cleaner” or “neater”). (link)

Later on in the thread, from someone else on the Chromium team reporting user feedback:

The “+” button to open a new tab is not showing up in Chrome browser. Users are requesting to restore the plus sign as a visual aid to its purpose, which also does not have a tool-tip…

10+ reports were submitted in GoogleFeedback in last two days about this issue. (link)

I’m baffled by this change. It seems like a minor issue, but it’s also completely arbitrary, and I think it could have some real usability issues. I have a feeling we’ll see the plus sign return in a future version of Chrome.

I love hearing feedback from my users. I would love to hear every detail about what they love, hate, or want in my apps. But that’s not always so easy to come by. The users that really care about the app, or are really opinionated, will find a way to express their opinion to you.

But there is a large number of users that would probably give you feedback if it was simple and immediate right when they’re experiencing an issue, or have a suggestion for improvement. You might assume that a user will dig through your site to find your contact form or email address, and take the time to write a thoughtful email, but you’d be wrong.

Here’s two examples of apps that do it right in my opinion. I’ve sent both of them feedback 2 or 3 times, where most sites I never do.

Gimmebar

Gimmebar is one of my favorite new apps. I’ve been using to save design inspiration for the last month or so. They use what is now a bit of a standard for getting feedback — a tab fixed to the left, right, or bottom of the window. What they do differently is using a custom form for feedback that only has a text box, that’s it.

I want the least resistance as possible, and Gimmebar nails it. You really can’t make it any simpler than that. The GetSatisfaction/UserVoice style feedback boxes feel like too much work to me. A bunch of fields and options, to get my feedback into a system to be rated and commented upon. For the most part, I’m not looking to participate in your product’s development, I just want to send feedback, what you do with it after is up to you.

Gaug.es

I’ve just recently started using Gaug.es, but so far it’s a really nice product. They have a fairly standard feedback box, simple and well designed.

Though I’d prefer they ditch the “I’m Feeling” drop down, as I’ve never been a fan of that idea. Feels more like a chore to sort out my emotional state on a minor display bug. If a user can’t find their emotion, they’re likely just to give up.

What they get right is that the feedback link is in their main navigation. That tells me it’s important to them, and not something they just threw in there at the last minute. They put thought into where it should go, and decided to put in front and center.

The most important thing

What they both get right is the most important thing. Both sites responded, and quickly, to everything I’ve submitted. It doesn’t matter how nice your feedback process is if it goes into a black hole.

It’s a little harder to get feedback in a desktop app, but I’m working on taking my own advice and finding an easier way to get feedback in my Mac apps.

It’s easy to do too much with your app. Much easier than doing too little. It takes restraint and focus to pare down the features to just what the user needs to achieve their goal. If you’re not constantly mindful of this, you just starting throwing every feature you think a user might want, and the user experience suffers.

Here’s an example. There is a nice social network for reading called Goodreads. You can add books to read, see what your friends are reading, keep a history of books you’ve read, etc. I haven’t used it all that much, so I recently wanted to turn off my email notifications, and this is what I saw:

Good lord. I don’t know where to start on that, and that’s not even all of it. I’ve left out about 300 pixels at the bottom, and every settings tab has just about as much info. I just want to disable email alerts, I don’t want to spend all afternoon in there. The very least this screen could do would be a single checkbox that said “I’d like to receive email notifications”. That would have been fine with me. Maybe I would think I want some more options, but in reality, I’d much rather not have the choice. So many apps make things more complex than they need to be, because they think it’s what users want or need, but you can always get away with doing less.

In any sort of design, it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. All those tiny details are what make up a great experience for the user. Here’s an example from pinboard. When bookmarking a site I’ve already bookmarked, it lets me know I’ve previously saved it and when:

I may be forgetful, but I’m glad to know pinboard isn’t. I don’t want to bookmark the same thing multiple times, and this is a nice solution to preventing that. Even fills in all the tags and info you entered before so you can update it if you want.

If you like these kind of touches, you should check out Little Big Details.