What are some good examples of "novel user experience" engineering you like/have used for web and Windows apps?

Question

What I'm looking for in this question are interface bits, eye candy, easter eggs, novel error messages or anything cool and interesting that you thought was particularly creative and that enhanced the user experience of an application. Feel free to brag on your own stuff!

I'm thinking if things like:

• Creative 404 pages
• The Digg 'Kevin`s fault' Message
• Nation Discount Broker's Duck Quack
• Twitter's Fail Whale

I think these examples embody what I'm looking for: novel ideas that helped cushion the disappointment of errors in an app, or things that just simply made an application more fun to use. Big or small, it doesn't matter.

What have you seen that amused you (in a good way) when using an app? Or what did you implement that users loved?

[Edit to add: If you, like Uri from comments, don't like REALLY novel stuff, what things that aren't in the "fun" category do you think are value-adds in this vein? I would argue, for example, that design decisions could enable users to more quickly and easily get to what they want from an app - what are examples of those sorts of things?]

Answer 1

I have to say that personally, I don't like when seemingly standard pages and failures are replaced with "cute" behaviors.

If I go into a website and get an error, I like the ability to back out the instant that the 404 appears and before my brain even realized that.

Any situations where I have to process a page and then realize that it's an error is disappointing and mildly annoying at times.

To me, a cute "error message" makes as much sense as a "we really liked your skills but chose to hire somebody else" kind of rejection letter.

Another way to approach this question is the blue screen test: If you just lost something important, is there any screen that can help you more (except for sensible error messages).

Answer 2

The most obvious example of a "novel user experience" I can think of is Google, though I'm sure by now we've all grown quite accustomed to it; I, personally, perform at least 15-20 google searches a day. However, the idea that a search engine should just be a search provider, not a web portal, was quite a novel idea when Google was first launched. And just by their innovative approach to online advertising alone, they've managed to improve the user experience of nearly all web surfers by getting webmasters to trade in their banner ads for text ads.

Additionally, Google's intelligent search query system allows it to not only be more intuitive (which equates to user-friendliness) than other search engines, but can also be used as a dictionary (which is actually better than any online or print dictionary if the word isn't spelled phonetically), a calculator, as well as for unit conversions.

I still remember how amazed I was the first time I typed a unit conversion into the Firefox search tool (with Google as the selected search engine). Almost as soon as I'd finished typing "X km in mi" the answer immediately appeared below the search box. And I can't even begin to count the number of times Google's "Did you mean..." suggestions helped me locate the info I wanted when the endeavor would have been hopeless on any other search engine.