Over the years, I’ve worked on many important, large-scale projects, from figuring out high level strategy and blue sky products, to overhauling core flows and IA, to implementing design systems from the ground up.
Working on these big projects can be exhilarating. They’re often deemed critical by company leadership and various stakeholders, and it’s validating to be trusted with and attached to something so visible and impactful.
I recently shipped two things at GitHub that had an impact beyond my wildest dreams. The amount of gratitude and love that spilled out of the community is like nothing I’ve seen before. But the things I shipped weren’t these huge, meaty projects. They were tiny.
First, we made the favicons for GitHub Pull Request pages dynamic. Now browser tabs will always show a PR’s current build status. Before releasing this, users had to periodically click back into tabs to see if their builds had completed so they could continue their work. Impatient users would click back into various PR tabs a lot.
A little hack week project @notdetails and I just shipped. pic.twitter.com/3EvfEmWtan
I put together new favicons and Jason worked on implementing the dynamic switch. This change took less than a week, and hundreds of people noticed it immediately. This is just a small sample of the many delighted responses.
My next project was changing the ... indicator on new PR pages to an arrow that indicated merge direction. Before releasing this, people would regularly confuse which branch would be merged into which.
Ever get confused between your “base” and “compare” branches? Shipped a tiny @github change today that will hopefully clear things up. pic.twitter.com/acOddhxLDs— Joel Califa (@notdetails) December 4, 2017
This was a one-line code change that took a few minutes. I didn’t even design the arrow — it was already in our icon set.
This tiny change solved a seemingly small frustration, but it turned out to be very significant to many of our users. Again, we saw hundreds of enthusiastic responses and shares.
The first of these changes took just under a week and the second took only a few minutes. Both changes affected very small sections of the platform, yet both enjoyed a passionate, almost euphoric reception. Users were excited.
That’s not to say that impact can or should be measured by the number of likes received (unlike, say, personal worth). But the individual responses tell a story of how meaningful even the smallest tweak can be to your users.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the following graphic in its various forms over the years:
The obvious advice, as seen in this version of it, is to execute on things that take little time and make big dents. Curiously, I haven’t seen many organizations actually take this advice to heart. Considering how valuable this type of work can be, I honestly don’t understand why.
Let’s discuss what changes like this can do for you.