The drag-to-install is a pretty standard paradigm in OS X, as is using a custom background image to spiffy up one’s disk image folder in Finder. This example from Adium combines instruction with cuteness in a particularly stylish and memorable way. The duck(?) throwing up his wings is adorable-tastic.
How’d I miss this one? Oh, right, it’s completely non-obvious and there’s no tooltip. Anyway, if you click the replied-to icon, Mail will find and show you the reply. Nifty!
Here was a nice surprise: Visual Studio points out which of your typefaces are fixed-width, therefore most suitable for its code view. Simple, (pleasantly) surprising, elegant. Interestingly, I didn’t notice the explanatory caption at the time; it was obvious. Even better.
Never use a single element or style as an indicator. It’s a very basic principle, but one that’s often forgotten (yeah, I do it too). To take a small example, say you’ve decided to turn off underlining on active hyperlinks, and just use color to indicate the links. Now you’ve possibly screwed color-impared users, or users with a high-contrast theme.
Good user experiences, however, don’t rely on single clues to differentiate content, indicate actions, etc. Here’s a great example. On iPhone OS 3.0, OmniFocus gets horked, dropping the text labels on three of the six categories:
Had they only used text, I’d have to memorize the list and think about the ordering every time*. But, since each group also has a unique color, I lose no productivity, even though the UI is broken. This is the sort of good redundancy I love to see. Even if was an accident, it’s a definite WIN.
*=Yeah, yeah, there are only three things. But what if there were 30, or the ordering changed dynamically?
Continuing on the theme of my last post, more good visuals to indicate to users what’s going on. In this case, the MobileMe preference pane shows what direction data will flow on the next sync.
Not only is there a great big toggle button with arrows (instead of a silly text label you have to decipher), the orange arrow moves in the direction chosen, reinforcing the decision. Nice!