One of my favorite little bits of user interface design can be found in Birdhouse, a little app written by Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt. Birdhouse (“A Notepad for Twitter”) is an app for people who like to write drafts of their tweets, or who have ideas for tweets that they don’t have time to polish but also don’t want to forget. It saves your tweet drafts in a list, and allows you to publish them when they’re ready, from within the app.
Pretty straightforward, and a nice-looking UI for all that. But the bit that I love love love comes when you tap that big “Publish” button on the bottom-right corner of the screen. The bottom navigation bar turns a darker shade of blue and displays a very simple question: “Publish?” You can cancel the action, or tap the “Publish” button again to actually do the deed.
Love it. Subtle, yet obvious. It forces you to make a considered decision, but unlike a modal alert box, it does so without rudely yanking you out of the context in which you were doing all your work. I don’t know about you, but I hate rude software. Birdhouse isn’t rude; however, it is direct, and I like to think that that one-word confirmation question — Publish? — is being asked of me by someone who knows that, likely as not, the thing I’m thinking about posting is snarky, or rude, or overtly clever, or self-involved in any of a million different, unbecoming ways. Someone who wants to know, is this the best I can do? And of course it usually isn’t.