How the UI Details Make an Impression

Jean-Louis Gassee, when he was VP of product development at Apple Computer, used to love to say, "God is in the details." (Yeah, I know he didn't originate that quotation; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe did.) I always knew instinctively that he was right. Today brought me another bit of evidence.

I normally use Firefox as my browser. But last night before I turned in, I was exploring Sun Labs' Lively Kernel project, which runs best in Safari 3, so I fired up that browser. (It would be my browser of choice but I rely on some Firefox plug-ins and I still run into the occasional site that doesn't render properly in Safari.) This morning as I went to check my email, Safari was already open, so I just used it to log into my Google Mail account.

As I worked on my mail, I was struck by the subtle, almost undetectable sense that this experience was somehow crisper and cleaner and more "elegant" than my gMail experience in Firefox. As that notion crept into my consciousness, it occurred to me to wonder why I felt that way. So I opened the two browsers to the mail page side by side. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my 24-inch iMac?)

The only difference between the two displays as far as I could tell was the buttons in the browser. Safari renders the buttons as round-cornered rectangles with clear outlines. Firefox renders the buttons as rectangles with slight drop-shadows. Somehow, the round-cornered buttons stand out more crisply. Also, Safari uses a slightly cleaner font on the buttons. The net result is that the page looks and feels more like an application than a Web page.