"Good Enough" Is No Longer Good Enough

So I came across an interesting little script that adds ‘animated page scrolling’ to anchor links within a page. What I found more intriguing than the script itself was the author’s justification:

“It might seem like nothing but eye candy, but it can be a great way to lead a user around a page while still giving them some context as to where they are.”

This statement hits the nail on the head: Whether it’s a yellow fade technique, slide out menus, or animated page scrolling—these nifty little animation tricks do much more than entertain, they communicate. Where am I? Did something just happen? Where did that go? Where did that come from? These animations are subtle but powerful interaction cues.

Not just animations
It is precisely details like this that differentiate really great designs from, well everything else.

In 2003, I gave a presentation on how to get web designs from good to great, emphasizing that it probably takes the same time to get from ‘zero to 95%’ that it takes to get from ‘95% to 100%’.

While my focus at that time was more on visual web design than it was on interaction design (focusing on things like typography and texture), the point remains the same: design details take time and careful attention.

What has changed since then is this: details are no longer a luxury. If you’re building an online application, it is the details and micro-innovations that are going to make one product preferable to another. Whether it’s shaving millimeters off of a phone design (in the product design world) or obsessing on the best language to use in an application—the dollars are in the details. Sure, where there’s a new market, or new innovations, there is plenty of room to screw up on these details. That’s expected. But as a market matures and the big problems get solved, the expectations for ‘getting it right’ are naturally raised. When pretty good is standard, it’s time to start obsessing over the details.

So, what are you doing, using, recommending, or trying out now that you weren’t one year ago?