One of the things that I love most about the online environment is that you can continually improve your product offering in real time. In the old paradigm of published software, you typically released a major upgrade every 3-4 years (1.0, 2.0, ...) and then pushed smaller updates into what those in the industry like to call "point releases" like Windows 3.1 or IE5.5. There is definitely a right and a wrong way to incrementally evolve your offerings online. I'm always pleased when I notice something new on a site that is particularly elegant in its simplicity.
Consider the age old reality that many people like to print out web pages for reference. In the early days of the web, pages were simply formatted and typically printed fine. Then web designers discovered tables and a thousand other layout hacks and fixed-width layouts, that, combined with nav bars and ad banners and various other features, soon resulted in pages that are miserably hard to reliably print on standard A4/letter paper.
Over time, some sites (most notably newspaper sites) began offering links to alternative renderings of pages that were deemed "printer friendly". Unfortunately, some sites have implemented this better than others and there is little consistency (some sites use icons, some text links, some strip out all formatting and just dump text, others offer structured/formatted text without graphics, some thoughtfully include the original publication URL and date, others don't even provide basic site information, ....).
On my prior blog, bryce.weblogs.com (which Dave Winer has promised to export to me after July 1 after having taken all *.weblogs.com sites offline earlier this month with NO warning), I embedded a dynamic link in the nav bar which would automatically generate a printer-friendly version of the current page. That was 2000.
Today, I discovered an even more elegant solution:
Tip: When you print this page, you'll automatically get a printer-friendly version.
That's from the top of the page in an online banking session with www.wellsfargo.com.
Proof that sometimes the best user experience is the invisible one.
