We come into contact with interfaces every day. Here are a few that I use that put a smile on my face!
Deliveroo
Deliveroo have managed to make food delivery incredibly straightforward. They don’t have as much choice as their peers like Hungry House or Just Eat, but that’s an advantage to me – a smaller selection stops me feeling overloaded by choice. Most of the restaurants that have signed up (in the Brighton area at least) are smaller independent restaurants which you wouldn’t normally think would deliver their product.
They do a great job of storing payment information so you don’t have to key in your credit card number every time you order. Obviously, you need to enter all those details when you first order, but it’s plain sailing from there on in!
The iOS app has a great feature where the delivery drivers send a GPS signal of their location so you can actually track where they are as you start to get hungrier.
Neff induction hob
There are a few things that can make an interface really sing: intuition, responsiveness and predictability. I just had one of these installed in my kitchen and this hob has all of those qualities in spades.
The hob only has one dial which controls all of the four hobs – you just tilt it to select a burner and turn to adjust the temperature. When you do you’ll see how rapidly your pan heats up and cools down, and you can be sure that the settings will be the same every time you use it.
My words don’t do justice to how much I love this thing!
Zara.com
Buying clothes online requires a lot of input from the user – type, style, colour, size, price and so on. Zara.com manages to simplify this process by removing all extraneous information and allowing the user to focus on the product they’ve actually shown an interest in.
Simple art direction with the photography adds to the feeling of cleanliness and focus in the process.
Chromecast
I’ll be honest – I’ve never come across a TV remote control that I’ve been able to use easily. That’s probably due to my own shortcomings, but the vast number of buttons and arrays leaves me somewhat bewildered. Phone apps on the other hand, have dynamic, contextual interfaces which can be much more intuitive. Chromecast allows you to use well-designed phone/tablet interfaces to replace cumbersome remote controls in a snap.