Why do small things matter?

“When life throws lemons at you, please dodge it, because it could have been used to cast off the evil eye!”

This is one of the famous quotes by KShetty, a demotivational speaker , also someone who sold his share auto to buy a bottle of old monk. The only thing that is common between both me and Kshetty is our love for humor.

So I was surfing the other day and thought of creating a funny GIF. I went straight up to www.giphy.com and tried signing in with my mail id instead of my Facebook ID. Once I entered all the details right and hit the sign up button, It threw me a pop up saying “username currently unavailable”, try another name.

I tried it n number times and every time the result would be still the same as South Africa trying to win a world cup. Finally I gave up!

I think this is a classic UX problem. Even though giphy is user friendly, sometimes it behaves like few non user-friendly government websites. The basic difference between both is, user friendly websites focus will be always on solving the user’s problem thus making their experience smoother while they accomplish their task. I may or may not be right here, but they could have done any of the following two basic things.

1. Suggesting whether the username is available or not when the user is typing inside the respective field.

2. Providing username suggestions when the required one is not available.

We all know this is a very basic thing in any sign up form and I don’t know how many people were really annoyed by this while signing up and moved to an alternative website. But thinking about this, i was wondering what if this was a similar case when a user tries to fill up a form in a landing page or in a website to collect some data or to download something on the internet , anything for that matter, we are not only making the user experience difficult but also shooing away our user/potential customer.

So always pay attention to little details because it is always the small things that makes a huge difference. As Kshetty would quote “If you don’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, its not because you are ugly, sometimes you lack a personality”.