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It’s the Little Things that Improve a User Experience!

Today was my first day in my new position as Director of Technology for a young Marketing and eCommerce software company here in Indianapolis, called Patronpath. As I reviewed our software today and assisted in a new integration, I was encouraged by the sophistication of the application. Our application integrates online ordering with several POS systems.

I’m looking forward to working with our development teams to bring our User Interface fully customizable utilizing CSS and, perhaps, some AJAX. The great news is that these are largely cosmetic changes that will not require gutting and rebuilding the application. Largely, I believe the application can be improved in two ways, first is the ability to customize the client’s interaction and the second is to implement some basic ‘little things’.

As I was working in Paypal last night, I found just a ‘little thing’. When you mouseover specific links in the Paypal interface, a nice fade-in tooltip appears and fades out when you mouseout off of it. Here’s a screenshot:

Mouseover on Paypal

Often when I notice these techniques, I do a little digging to find out more. In this case, I found out that Paypal is simply utilizing the

Yahoo! User Interface Library to build the tooltips. Even better, they are simply displaying the messaging of the actual title within the (a)nchor tag. This means that the page was developed normally, but when the class was added, JavaScript took care of the rest.

It’s little accents like this on software that really make it a better user experience. Perhaps more impressive is that the developers at Paypal didn’t bother to ‘reinvent the wheel’, they found a good library and implemented it.

I’ll be looking for these and other techniques in upcoming months to improve the user experience of our applications.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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