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.