IRS Beckoned into the Digital Age

Despite the rain here in Washington, the dreaded April 17th Tax Day has been pretty uneventful. The line at the post office near us isn’t remarkably long and no one looks particularly panicked. Most people I’ve spoken to have used some form of tax software to prepare their returns. I was going to use one myself,...

Web Design Matters.

The first ten years of the Internet are over. The web is no longer a new thing. It is an ingrained part of our lives.Studies show that users form their first impression about a website in 1/20th of a second. What are they going to think if that time is spent watching Flash animation load?...

User Interfaces: East Coast vs. West Coast

I recently had an insight about the interfaces of two extremely popular social networking websites: MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow you to create a page on their network where you can post a photo and profile of yourself, allowing your friends to contact you online. However, these two specific sites take very different approaches....

Google Finance (cont’d)

To follow up on Todd’s post below, I went to Google Finance and typed in HP, looking for the stock activity and news for the Hewlett-Packard Company. Look what I got.

1. Stock graph is for the contract oil driller Helmerich & Payne, but the news items on the right are about Hewlett-Packard (HP)....

Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems

Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable....