Most people don't spend their time thinking about their socks. And why should they? Socks are designed to go unnoticed, to give your foot a bit of protection from your shoe, to make your foot a bit more comfortable without you ever having to do anything more than put them on.
But is there anything worse than a sock that isn't doing it's job? If a sock gets twisted, or bunched, if the seam is too big or the elastic is failing, your socks go from unnoticed to intolerable, immediately to the center of your attention. Fortunately with today's socks this almost never happens. But there was a time not long ago when socks routinely misbehaved.
When I was growing up socks were split by a defining feature, they had a heel or they didn't. Socks with a heel were great, they fit right, they were comfortable, but they suffered one real problem; putting on socks with a heel was a pain. You picked up a pair of socks, pulled them on, and then invariably spent 10 minutes rotating each one on your feet until you finally had the heel in place.
The alternative was the tube sock. Tube socks had no heel so it could conceivably once you'd pulled the sock up it was on, no twisting required. Of course these socks still had a seam at the toe so if you wanted your feet to be comfortable you had to rotate them until the seam ran the right way, and eventually they'd develop a bulge or a thin spot where your heel was because they didn't fit the shape of your feet. I can only imagine that the inventor of the tube sock had a taste for schadenfreude and cackled with glee thinking of people wearing them.
So these then were your options, comfortable but annoying and a product conceived by someone who either hates humanity or has hooves for feet.
Fortunately a quiet revolution occurred in the late 80's and early 90's. This revolution was sparked by a simple improvement in UI (yes, socks have user interface) that drastically improved the wearers experience.
The addition of a gray heel and toe completely revolutionized socks, yet was so subtle that it isn't mentioned in the wikipedia article on socks. Immediately after the gray heel and toe were added people simply stopped putting socks on the wrong way. From across the room a person could see a pair of socks and simply know how to put them on. I'd like to think that the sales of tube socks dropped to zero within a week much to their inventor's dismay.
Now it's virtually impossible to find tube socks or socks without a different colored heel and toe. Heeled socks were always superior, but without the gray heel for many they weren't worth the trouble. Thanks to a simple change in user interface one area of our lives is drastically better without us so much as noticing.
In the end that's what great UI is it's something we don't have to notice. Occasionally some one might find a new feature or worth noting, but most UI revolutions are like the gray heeled sock, quiet.
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