A few people have emailed me over the past day voicing feedback on my Starbucks receipt mockup, based on an article by user interface designer Dustin Curtis.

Now, obviously, this concept is impractical in a lot of ways. Ink is expensive. Paper is expensive. It would take a while to print. The design wouldn’t even look good on paper. I suppose that it was worth a thought, though, and maybe is still a possibility for the future.

But what if we could still have this experience without those downsides? Maybe just ditch paper receipts altogether? It may be a huge undertaking to get people to adopt a system like that, but it’s not like we’re foreign to the concept.

Web retailers have been doing this for years. By emailing receipts, the cost would be next to nothing, aside from server costs. Plus, stores and restaurants would have room for innovation and, as emphasized in the last post, be able to improve the overall user experience and update an aging format.

I’ll keep this post concise, but I just want to thank everyone for their input. Just remember, though, that it’s still just a concept. Of course it’s not going to be perfect.

I recently read Dustin Curtis’ article about how little things affect the overall user experience in a brand or product. In the piece, he mocked up what an ideal receipt from Starbucks would look like, describing it as an opportunity for a company to apply its branding and improve its image in the process. For fun, I decided to take a stab at it, and so this is my result:

My own endeavor into receipt design. It provides a friendly and positive ending to a customer’s shopping experience, as compared to bland, forgettable receipts that are common today. I kind of want some coffee right now.

Imagine walking out the door with something like this. You almost want to keep it. Imagine if, as Dustin suggested, it was printed on thick, glossy paper. Maybe throw in some rounded corners to boot. (Starbucks trading cards. You heard it here first, folks.) Putting a little bit of extra money into this wouldn’t necessarily be so bad.

Experimentation aside, his post does make some valid points. When it comes down to it, users will notice if you’ve half-assed something, and so your product or brand will begin to lose appeal if you don’t focus on the details. You’ll probably disagree, but for me, even the most miniscule things can make the difference. For example, if the text label of a checkbox on a Website isn’t clickable, I find it irritating (especially when it comes to unchecking them for email subscriptions). If the default text in a search field doesn’t disappear when I click the box, I’m turned off. And so on and so forth. (See, you probably don’t even know what I’m talking about; that’s how picky I can be.)

Perhaps this is just because, as a designer, I focus on the details. But that doesn’t mean that these things won’t conglomerate and turn away the casual user. These possibilities always exist.

Even on this site, I’m constantly updating things to make the experience just that much better. I updated the tabs to make sure that they were more easily clickable and made it more obvious which one was selected. I updated the footer to make the subscribe link more readable. I fixed a non-issue to make sure that the site validates to W3C standards and works across most browsers (my apologies those of you still using Internet Explorer 6, but your browser is almost a decade old. Time to upgrade).

The receipt concept is just one example of how good design plays a role in how we live our everyday lives. However, it demonstrates that there absolutely is a lot of room for improvement in the future.

My infatuation with the Internet began around ten years ago. We had just gotten a computer chugging along with Windows 98, and signed up with AOL. Of course, back then, the Internet was a desolate place — compared to today, anyway. But, because of my age, none of that really mattered, since all of my time with it was just spent at the official Pokémon Website and searching my name on Ask Jeeves.

But it wasn’t long after that I actually wanted to do something with it; to be a part of it. I wanted to have my own special little place on the Internet. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about networking or programming, so I retired my efforts back to playing video games (N64, anyone?).

It wasn’t until a little later that I discovered HTML, and learned the basics from an article and cheatsheet at HowStuffWorks. At the time, I was making the most hideous atrocities one could find on the Internet. I misused tables, I overused frames and the color yellow seemed to be pretty prominent on my palette. But I had to start somewhere.

By the time I had my first laptop, things really started to take off. I was an avid user of Angelfire and then Freewebs, and so was able to really experiment with things. It eventually led me yearning to learn more, so I bought a book on PHP. With these new tools at my disposal, I could suddenly do more than I had ever hoped for, both design- and programming-wise.

✦ ✦ ✦

Even now, I’m still exploring different styles and trying to find my own place in the design world. This site’s redesign is one example of my ever-changing skill set, and so my own personal foundation of minimalism and simplicity shows through. That’s not to say, however, that in a year or two, I won’t come back with something completely different. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will. As my aforementioned skills change, I feel compelled to update my own site to reflect it and keep it modern. That’s what inspired the change from the previous design (and others before it), as well as the quiet logo update halfway through.

The truth is, though, nothing ever really stays the same. You may have noticed that I went out of my way to reminisce about the Internet of the olden days earlier in this post. Most of the mentioned entities still exist, but only some still hold a high place in the world. The others weren’t as lucky, having been (for the most part) replaced long ago by innovators who weren’t afraid of change — AOL with other ISPs, Ask Jeeves with Google, etc. Designers (and programmers) have to adapt to keep up with the ever-refashioned styles and trends of the Web.

The wonderful thing about the Internet, however, is that you don’t have to guess at the trends. The most common ideas are already laid out for us: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 have come and gone, and now even Web 3.0 is being dreamed up by new innovators. Each “iteration,” so to speak, has its own defining characteristics, and if a Website doesn’t have them (where necessary) or something better, then it’s difficult to compete. These self-defined standards are integral to where the Internet is heading. With them, sites are ensured to work in a number of different browsers, and have relatively uniform elements that casual users can become used to and comfortable with (like sidebars on blogs, navigation at the top of page, or even graphics themselves), since designers often borrow concepts that work from others.

However, more profoundly, they’re also useful so that — to be blunt — user interfaces don’t suck. Maybe it’s just natural selection, but we’ve only seen mainly just positive design choices pull through above negative ones. If our casual user from before is turned away from a product because of poor decisions, then that product may ultimately fail, leaving others to succeed.

So what lies in the future? What specifically will the characteristics of Web 3.0 be, and how much of a role will good user interface design play in it? While there’s no sure way to tell where we’ll be in five or ten years, one thing’s for certain: without designers and innovators, the Internet would still be a desolate wasteland full of un-user-friendly sites, misused tables, overused frames, and — take a long, deep breath — the color yellow.