Sprinkles – making a good website great  

Posted by James to Design, UX on September 1st, 2008  

The web already has a few food related terms, cookies, breadcrumbs, spam... I'd like to talk about another one... sprinkles.

What is a sprinkle?

Well, hopefully you always take the trouble to put some icing on your cake. But how do you make your cake even better, even tastier? In a word, sprinkles.

Sprinkles are additions to a website that take it up a notch, from 'good' to 'great'. Something that enhances the user experience, whether in terms of aesthetics or functionality. Sites might work perfectly well without them, but with sprinkles they becomes unique and memorable. We've started keeping a prioritised list of potential sprinkles when working on a project, so that we know what to come back to if there's some spare time at the end of it.

A few examples.

Firstly Yay Hooray's custom smileys, affectionately known as pinkies.

skinnyCorp specialise in creating online communities (maybe you know a tshirt site called Threadless), and these cute graphics emphasise the exclusive/fun/designer vibe of the Yay Hooray forum in a way that default smileys couldn't:

Secondly, Vimeo's illustrated footer and login screens. Again they make it feel like a destination/community and not just another video site. Check out this video by Chad Pugh which was the inspiration for the graphics:

On Marque's own site, the contact page usually lists studios like so:

But visitors in the USA (or at least with an IP address we think is located there) see things slightly differently. A subtle sprinkle but one that could make the difference between a potential client picking up the phone or not:

Last but not least, Apple's ajax search feature, which although not perfect, really pushed the bar for search: