I’ve been consuming a bit more news lately, and quite a bit of that through the Google News app.

To be clear, I’m really just going from “no news at all except those my friends PM me about” to “3-5 articles on Google News app”.

This morning as I read my three to five articles on the app, I realised a fantastic little piece of the user interface - every story on the list view has an image, and when you’ve read that article and hit back, that image turns to grayscale.

This is nice because it helps me see very quickly which stories I’ve read already, which is helping me get a sense of how many pieces I’ve read and prompting me to ask myself whether it’s time to stop and move on to do something else.

It’s so subtle and so good.

(I realise this UI is only good for people who are not colour blind or colour deficient. But it’s also not bad for said group of people because it doesn’t actually penalise their user experience. Without colour, you’ll still be able to browse articles.)