Google's Looking Out for Me.

It's not often I get excited about a User Interface feature as small as this, but I found this one pretty special.

I hopped into my Gmail and staring back at me was this:



That's Google, there, telling me without me having to track it down, that I may have a problem with my experience in Gmail due to third party software.

That's awesome. That is a good user experience.

They had to first decide that there was a problem affecting a good chunk of users (which means they are tracking that sort of thing meaningfully, not just to have the data around). Then they made a help topic on how to get around the issue. They didn't stop there. Not Google. They figured out how to tell that I was running Firebug and then told *me* that there may be a problem instead of waiting for me to figure it out the hard way.

It's nice to see that kind of user experience in action in something I use every day, not just being talked about.