What is the cleverest UI feature you have seen in a website? Something that:
Could be also something standard, but particularly well implemented.
Please restrict this to standard web technologies (HTML, AJAX etc.), no Flash or plugins please!
Thank you
In
we can have a page preview by selecting a color scheme which helped me a lot in designing web pages for my applications.
Ajax calendars e.g.
http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/Calendar/Calendar.aspx
Genuinely useful (what day of the week is that?) and don't get in the way.
For me, the cleverest UI functionality is simply when, after I have executed some sort of action, I am taken to / given focus on the place in the app I am likely to need next.
eg: ToDo app - I add an item to my todo list textbox. hit enter. the app adds my item then gives the textbox back its focus to allow me to get on and add the next todo item.
I find things like this make an app much slicker and easier to use than any really fancy bits - a bit of thought for how the user will make use of a particular piece of functionality makes all the difference...
Facebook is a great example of an ajax site. Looks good and works well (not perfectly ;))
Made the user experience more intuitive
Support for the back button and tabbed browsing, which GMail is a prime example.
I've used far too many ( Oracle based time booking systems seem the worst for this ) which just screw up if you use 'back' to go back to the page you were on before you clicked on a link.
On one site, nationalrail.co.uk, it's almost impossible to get train times for two different queries open in different tabs, as it stores the query on a per-user basis. ( so if you open one tab, make a journey query, open another tab, make another query, then ask for later trains on the first tab you get the details for the second journey ). Sometimes I have to open chrome and firefox or use more than one computer to plan my journey.
The way it is so simple to create an account on stackoverflow and the great integration with OpenId.
I will now consider using OpenId whenever I need a logon system for a website, now that I have experienced how well it can work.
I've seen something completely against all standards and it's also more an experiment, but it definitely has its wow factor. It's called Don't Click It and it's all about using an UI without clicking. Try it out for yourself, you'll be surprised how often you're tempted to click (at least that was my experience)
Drop-down suggestions for a search box, like ebay, amazon, etc. all use on their sites to make it easier for users to find search keywords. Google has this too, but the feature is arguably even more useful on a site-specific search, since you don't get random keywords which don't apply to that site.
I was involved with getting the search suggestions feature onto MSDN Search several years ago, and the usage metrics since then have been phenomenal: as many as 20% of English searches use the auto-suggest feature. In search, a feature is typically successful if over 3% of searches use it, since almost all the time when searching, people just choose the default UI and move on. 20% usage is unheard of-- no other search feature I've seen (on any site) comes close.
What's particularly nice about search suggestions is that they only take up screen real estate when someone actually needs them (typing into search box) and take up zero page real estate otherwise.
Also, you can extend them beyond simple suggestion lists-- you can show preview UI (like IE8's browser-toolbar-search-box's preview images do, or even allow one-click links to search results if users want to bypass search altogether).
It's hard for me to pick just one favorite UI feature. But what comes to mind when I think of good user interfaces is SmugMug. In my opinion they have far and away the best user interface among all of the online photo gallery sites.
Allow me to pick a gallery at random :
http://collierphotography.smugmug.com/Photography/Colorado/9289093%5Fh9zBa
And I'll list a few UI features that make it great:
When you click a small photo it takes you to a new page anchor (not a new page) while dynamically switching the medium-size photo you're looking at. First of all, this means that the site doesn't have to load the page over again, which would be a waste of time when you're just browsing images. Secondly, because it's a page anchor, the back/forward buttons in your browser work! I agree with Pete Kirkham, it really annoys me when a website is designed in a way that it fights you when you hit "Back". Fortunately, SmugMug is not one of those sites. In fact what they have is the ideal set up. The end result is a photo gallery that is easy to navigate while also being faster than just about anything else out there.
It conforms to the width of your browser. This isn't necessarily desirable in all sites but in a photo gallery it definitely helps.
They've implemented their own Lightbox-esque effect when you click the big image to make it even bigger. This will dim the background while you're looking at the photo and also offer more sizing options.
So it's not just one feature, and in fact there is no stand-out ground-breaking feature in any of this. But it's the combination of good UI practices coming together that makes this site very nice to use.
I like the jQuery UI ThemeRoller][1], which lets you customize a GUI theme for jQuery. Especially cool is its Firefox Bookmarklet, which lets you take a jQuery UI page and play with its appearance dynamically.
This is a bit esoteric, because it really applies to just wiki-tech, but I think the edit-by-section feature of some wiki's is great. I have to use several different wiki's, and when you are editing a really large page in a wiki that does not support edit-by-section (or worse, also doesn't support preview your diff), you feel like like every change could result in disaster.
I know it's not glamour or slick, but imagine thinking that up way back in 1965!?!
That was clever!
Google maps is by far the most clever/advanced non-flash UI on the internet.
Gmail: for the amazing responsiveness and for the keyboard shortcuts (all of them but especially the label shortcuts: apply a label, move to label, go to label).
Google Calendar: for the clever UI allowing to view, add, and drag-and-drop events from one date to another without reloading the page.
In both case, the offline mode with Gears is a nice plus.
Google Analytics beats anything else I've seen hands down (IMO). Perfect example of an intuitive UI to present voluminous information in a crisp manner.
The way that some web forum applications pop-up a window, rather like a tool-tips window, that contains the first paragraph or two of the posting. When you are looking at a list of topics, trying to decide which ones are worth reading, it can get tedious to click, wait for full page refresh, click the back button, wait for page refresh again. It isn't obvious whether there is an AJAXy way to handle this since the page layout (and thinking process) for topic lists and topic threads is so different. But this one little feature, which could be implemented with or without AJAX, goes a long way to making it a more pleasant experience to browse forums.
Lots of pages use hovering for all kinds of eye-candy, and sometimes they really overdo it to the point of being annoying or making the pages hard to use, but this posting preview hover is great stuff.
I like Remember The Milk SmartAdd edit box very much. It is simple and powerful way to set all information at one place.
I think one of the best simple, oldest, javaScript UI enhancing API's out there is Highslide (http://www.highslide.com/). It is used absolutely everywhere (see Implementations) and can be used for inline, ajax or off-site content. Easy, effective and brilliant.
I use it on my site for simple photos (www.rogoff.uk.com), but we also use it for much more sphisticated web based applications at work. Allows multiple moving windows easily maximising space and content in your browser.
The stackoverflow alert bar is beautiful. I love it. Now I'm that kind of guy who has ~200 tabs open at a time, so whenever I restart firefox, there are at least a dozen websites with the stupidest prompts EVER... and that really <some word here> me off.