Small Wonder

Great experiences never look “designed”. But that doesn’t mean the experience was not designed. It’s just that great designs are invisible. The outcome of great designs are often looked as the most obvious thing to be or the simplest thing ever. The well designed experience can be so smooth that no one ever realizes that someone actually thought and made that experience to be like that and its not really the only way it could have been.

Why I love twitter is coz of this reason that it’s so well designed that it looks like the simplest thing ever. Whatever you can actually “see” in Twitter as a tool is so tiny even though the impact it creates is huge. Twitter as a tool is a breeze to use, there is nothing much to figure out to use it and nothing much to do to setup things.

For example, in Twitter you can choose to receive tweets on your phone as text messages. You need to register your phone with twitter to get it activated. Once you put in your phone number Twitter shows a PIN and asks you to send it from the phone number to validate if the number your have entered is right. Now the interesting part is here. I have seen so many sites giving me PIN for phone validation but the PIN Twitter gave me was special. It was wgjmga



Now what’s special about wgjmga? Look at it carefully… Ok if you still didn’t get it start typing them on the phone and you will. The 6 letter PIN needs only the same number of key punches as it’s a combination of all the first letters on the phone keys.

Now this is what I call a good design as seldom users will even have the time to actually notice it, he would finish the task in a jiffy and continue with other good things in life. This is what I also call a small wonder coz it’s a small experience which makes life really easy. Oh well it also proves that design is not only about photoshop :-)

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