Issue 11 16th June 2023

Welcome

Welcome to Nice UX Design: a celebration of the small details found in products that elevate them and make them greater than the sum of their parts.

Each issue features some examples of nice details from the digital and physical worlds, along with the occasional not-so-nice detail where things could have been improved.

Nice Details

Using Spotify in airplane mode

Recently I was on a long flight listening to music. I'm an indecisive listener, so I switch to the Spotify app a lot to add songs to my queue and change playlists. Annoyingly, every time I opened the Spotify app from the background I was presented with an alert saying I'm offline.

As far as I'm aware, this is an alert that comes from iOS itself when an app tries to access the network when airplane mode is on. However, there's an opportunity for Spotify to be smarter here and not try to access the network if the device is offline, preventing the intrusive alert from appearing every time.

Lightsabers in Spotify

In Spotify, if you're listening to music from Star Wars, the play bar is replaced with a lightsaber. This is the first of two entries featuring Spotify today – read on for a not-so-nice detail from them.

Thanks to Antonia from my job for sharing this!

npm's login screen

npm is a package manager used by developers. I really like their login screen, which features their mascot watching you type your details in. My favourite part is how a little blind rolls down so it can't see your password.

DALL·E 2's prompt advice

DALL·E 2 is an AI tool for generating images based on text descriptions (e.g. "a sunset over a waterfall, made from clay").

It takes 10-15 seconds to generate images, and it puts this time to good use by offering some advice on how you can make better use of it. It's a nice way to make use of what would otherwise be a boring loading screen.

That's all

That's everything for this issue.

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To submit content for inclusion, message me on Mastodon @[email protected], Twitter @shauneba or email.

For more of my work, check out my iOS apps Personal Best and Taylor's Version.

Until next time!