It's the small things

It's the small things that make all the difference. There are blogs dedicated to the small details in our every day applications. The little touches that bring them to life, make them feel more human and make them fun to use.

For example, early in his career (and before he joined Apple), renowned Apple design chief Jony Ive designed the Zebra TX2 pen. Other than simply being a pen he added a ball and clip mechanism to the top, for no reason other than to give the user something to fiddle with when they're not writing.

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One of our developers was tasked with rolling out a new system to a call centre in a previous role. Knowing how the call centre staff sometimes found their day to day job somewhat mundane he sneaked a small feature into the system without management approval. Right clicking on the logo in the top corner revealed a selection of colours. Choosing one of these changed the entire application skin to a different colour scheme - red, pink, orange, black, blue etc. A minor feature, perhaps, but one which allowed each user to customise the system to suit their personality, or perhaps just their mood that day.

Both of these are small things. Little details, almost incidental, but which have the potential to make the life of whoever is using them that little bit more enjoyable.

We love small details, and we've taken the opportunity to slip some into our new website skin. We're not going to tell you where they all are because part of the fun is spotting them. But, if you reload the homepage you should see a little dancing equalizer playing while the event images load. We've replaced a standard loading animation which something which, we feel, better reflects our position in the live music industry.

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It's a small detail, but it makes the site more human and - hopefully - a little bit more enjoyable to use. As we progress through our journey to rebuild our entire ticketing platform we look forward to adding more small touches such as this one.

We hope you enjoy using our software as much as we enjoy creating it.