Little Big Details (@littlebigdetail) is a Tumblr that highlights small, but meaningful design details in various software from all over the place.
This one shows how bud.ge reimagines settings as a letter written by the user to the software. It’s both personal in nature and natural in language, very clever.
Kudos to bud.ge.
I can hear you saying “What’s a letter?” Sigh. This is why we can’t have nice things.
I love its cleverness, but as a user I would have questions about the final paragraph. In the example, a sliding scale of responses is allowed, ranging from “LOVE” to “am okay with” to “sorta hate” (and presumably to “DESPISE”). I can see how such a scale would work with software that already includes prioritization (such as an email package), but I don’t see how this would work with items that don’t include prioritization, such as Twitter direct messages. Either you get Twitter direct messages or you don’t.
Or perhaps I’m overthinking this…
You’re overthinking 🙂 We can’t see all the values in those dropdown, and I’m thinking they’re probably pithy binaries, not a sliding scale. I like the simplicity of natural language applied to settings, which are, more often than not, very complicated and confusing. Settings tend to get a small amount of UX, only a bit more than error messaging.