Courtesy of the Buy.com product search results page:

• How many people know what a “permalink” is?  And when did we start differentiating between “permanent” and… non-permanent links?  If there’s one thing that will make the web more usable, it’s the idea that some links are temporary.  As if bookmarking isn’t complicated enough…
• The way it’s been presented is that it looks like a label for the “product zoom” toggle.
• The lightning bolt / shock icon doesn’t exactly imply permanence. I can’t imagine many folk eager to click on icon which we’ve only experienced as a warning label on power transformers.
• Less of your interface is better. If “permalinking” is so important, can’t you mod_rewrite or engineer your app in such a way that it doesn’t have to be requested?

And yes, that’s some engineering on my part to search for ‘usability’ so that something so ridiculous shares the screen with something so not ;-)

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Having had a recent blowout on eBay after our latest relo, I’m in the midst of updating my shipping information when…

And you thought the government wasn’t helpful. Here’s the scary part from the USPS CSS:

.stackTraceRed {
color:#CC0000;
}

Someone actually took the time to verify that this is what a stack trace would look like. There’s no excuse for this sort of lazyness in development. Anything is more useful.

In related news, I really enjoy the conversational tone of the Scotch tape I’m using… “Yet Strong In Use!”

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Objective – Locate a Comcast charge made during August.

Means – Chase Online’s credit card search interface.

Issues – How long do you have?

1. Several near-alignment and centering issues. I’m hard-pressed to find a single instance of alignment in this entire interface. It appears unprofessional and amateur.
2. Components are jam packed together as though there were issues with how much vertical space is available on a web page. This is well “below the fold” so a few more pixels won’t hurt.
3. “Select Account”… I have no choices available to me here and I’m looking at my credit card right now! What else could I possibly want to search? State Farm? My medical records?
4. “Search for” in the header doesn’t flow into any other part of the interface. “Search for… Select Account”?
5. Choices in the “Since Last Statement” combo box reflect how the bank thinks about my activity, not how I think about it: “Last Statement”, “2 Statements Prior”, “3 Statements Prior”, “All Transactions”.  Hey geniuses, if I knew where it was, I wouldn’t have to search for it!
6. The “From” and “To” fields are blank slates. I have no idea how I’m supposed to format my input into these fields. How about some bounded date-input components? Or a JavaScript-based calendar picker like the ones travel sites use?

Guys, you’re running a massive bank here. Drop minimum wage on a high school student to clean this up. Because you’re my bank, I’ll get you started.

The first option defaults to the last three months. The second option defaults to the current calendar year. Only Chase can tell me if this is what people are typically interested in, but it’s certainly better than what I’ve been using for the past few years on their site.

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Viewing videos at GameSpot comes with an interesting twist – a novel approach to scrolling.

The pain of vertical scrolling has been somewhat alleviated by the ubiquity of the mouse wheel; no more precision drags or clicks in the right margin. GameSpot has opted to implement horizontal scrolling, and while capturing wheel events is entirely possible (e.g. Google Maps) they have chosen not to.

Furthermore, they’ve broken the typically scrolling component by not bordering the content with scroll controls (Windows) or making the scroll controls adjacent one another in the scrolling direction (Mac).

Yahoo! features a media player with almost precisely the same layout but in place of the horizontal control they have… wait for it… a scrollbar. We’re getting there! However no mouse wheel support and positively microscopic scroll controls don’t make this much more usable. The white dot (representing your place in the content) can be pulled neither up nor down as we’ve come to expect from scrollbars.

Why violate convention for an already cumbersome interaction?

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