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Ask HN: What are some impressive small features you've seen?

by explosion-s·1y ago·9 comments·view on hn ↗

Wondering what impressive small features people have seen around, this can be for instance a text/hover effect, something being nicely interactive, etc, very small UX/UI improvements that make a big difference.

9 comments

I love 1password's "Show in Large Type" feature, which shows your password in a large monospace font with symbols and numbers clearly differentiated. Makes it super easy to see and type on another device (like when you have it open on your phone and use it to log in on another computer). https://blog.1password.com/posts/2018/b5x1.10/large-type.png

Small touches like that are awesome, and why I'm happy to pay for 1password over the OS or browser password managers or competitors like Bitwarden.

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For my company's support team, they often had to reset customer passwords over the phone (I know, how archaic). I copied that 1password look and then added the NATO phonetic alphabet below each letter / number so they can easily read the entire password out loud (like "whiskey tango foxtrot delta zero zero delta"). Last I heard, that one tiny tweak (which took twenty minutes to add) ended up saving them hours on the phone each day just by preventing a bunch of misspoken/misheard passwords.

As someone who enjoys RPG games with a lot of collectibles, Terraria’s “Quick stack to nearby chests” comes to mind. For those who haven’t played Terraria, here’s how this works: you stand in your base next to chests you’ve stored your loot in, click a button in your inventory window, and any items in your inventory which already exist in nearby chests get automatically sent to the appropriate chest. It’s a small feature, but huge in terms of QoL/time savings, especially if you’re like me and hoard everything you find

Gosh, I really miss quality of life features like that in modern MMOs. Path of Exile is especially bad in this regard, requiring you to manually click and drag and items around your tiny inventory just to sort them. Ugh. At least when you want to stash them (into paid stash tabs), they can automatically go to the right tab.

I think a couple more have caught on, but Netflix was one of the first I think to let you press a button to finish your email login for popular email providers. So you could press the "@gmail.com" button instead of typing it all out. Doesn't really matter on a computer, but was nice when signing in on a TV.

One small thing on iOS: the clock app icon shows the actual time.

The calendar shows the actual date too, right?

Yes it does. Also good example. I just like how it utilizes the small space of the app icon to provide the essence value of the app.

Same on android.

two-finger pinching for zooming on trackpad...we are getting closer to smartphone features