There is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem in our line of business, in that we have to convince you that we're not just normal-software-company levels of trustworthy and competent, but trustworthy and competent enough for you to put us solidly in the middle of your revenue. Additionally, due to the way our business works, we might have to do that before you even have revenue.
So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.
The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."
So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.
The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."