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I honestly can't believe I just read that. (And I really can't believe it got moderated up.)

Can you really not conceive of any way that computers could be working better? Do you really have such a lack of imagination?

Personally, I think it's ridiculous to stick a typewriter keyboard in front of a TV screen and call it a computer.

because the telephone is fine as is.

No, the telephone is not "fine." It's just that we're so used to its terrible user interface that we resist any change to it. The fact that the use of telephones hasn't changed since the rotary dial was stuck on it is not a good thing! It just goes to show how much inertia human behaviour really has.

If in 2015 I'm still staring at a screen and poking at a keypad designed to work best on a clumsy 19th century mechanical device, I'll be muchly disappointed.

JohnnyB
johnbowman.net

First of all, let me say I enjoy your work Baptist Death Ray. I have "Pharisee" and I listen to it on a regular basis...I really should check out the rest of what you've done.

I agree with about 50% of what you have to say, and I respect it because you are a musician, so you know what you're talking about, and you believe it. But I think on the main point you're wrong.

Perhaps I'm just a helpless idealist, but I think all information should be free, mine and yours included. Obviously, there should be some rules of ethics regarding the use of the information -- like cite, don't plagurize -- but for the most part, these already exist.

I was going to go on about how Napster and Gnutella change everything, whether you like it or not, but from your other posts, it's clear that you understand that. I also agree that these are going to be merely tools for promotion of the big bands -- because people need to hear about a song to download it. Even I, avowed pretentious indie rock and punk fan, found out about your music from my subscription to Listen.com's newsletter (before it started to totally suck, by the way). This is a problem, and it affects MP3.com et. al just as much as napster.

The solution is collaborative filtering. Even a basic form a la Amazon.com's "people who like this also like these..." would be a great improvement. If you want to make some bucks, I'd find a good domain name and set up a system like this. Make it like Listen.com, but not shitty (read: easy to use...don't seperate the artist's info into four different pages just so you can rack up the banner hits). Offer a rating service. Display the most recent, the most downloaded, and the most highly rated songs on the front page.

That can get an artist's name out. This helps a lot. By getting more listeners, you reach many deaf ears, but you may also find true fans. True fans will support their artist and buy t-shirts, CDs, posters, etc. Offer this. A service like cafepress.com could do this. Let the artist set the prices, or point to their own merchendise page. The idea is to get as many artists as possible invovled, so treat them like gods.

Fans can buy stuff and be happy. But what if they don't want to pay $15 for a t-shirt? I don't think "true" mircopayments will ever work, because they are not volentary, and hence, not ethical, but a "give this artist $1" link might work great!

I think it would rule if there was a site like this. Anyone want to help me make it? :)

"Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean."

He [revisits the problems] a few years later, and miscoloured links are still a problem:

"Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link.)"

Anyway, I think blue and red are the correct colours, as I originally stated. I'd have to reinstall an ancient Netscape to verify that I (and Jakob) are right, though...

--

"Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean."

He [revisits the problems] a few years later, and miscoloured links are still a problem:

"Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link.)"

Anyway, I think blue and red are the correct colours, as I originally stated. I'd have to reinstall an ancient Netscape to verify that I (and Jakob) are right, though...

--

This could explain the higher-than-I-would-have-expected attention to banner ads. Also explains what baffled one reporter: why the Sun-Times site beat the online Chicago Tribune two-to-one.

The early eye-tracking research is mentioned in this article. I used to have an url for the study, but I can no longer find it. The article just referenced berates user registration forms, or at least it says you should delay registration, says that most web advertising is a waste of money, and the best (most cost-effective) way of attracting users is through affiliate programs.

Probably most interesting and useful is this 1997 article on how users read on the web. It gives great advice on laying out content in a way that users will be comfortable with.

Enjoy!
J

The early eye-tracking research is mentioned in this article. I used to have an url for the study, but I can no longer find it. The article just referenced berates user registration forms, or at least it says you should delay registration, says that most web advertising is a waste of money, and the best (most cost-effective) way of attracting users is through affiliate programs.

Probably most interesting and useful is this 1997 article on how users read on the web. It gives great advice on laying out content in a way that users will be comfortable with.

Enjoy!
J

Right here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000514. html :)

This question was answered recently in the affirmative on Jakob Neilsen's UseIt which has lots of useful commentary on these kind of usability studies - going back through a couple years' worth will reward your time - or just buy the book, whatever :-) He cites a study which shows that using two browser windows is a common way of dealing with lag when loading sites and that users seem to have no trouble with it.

The Poynter Eyetrack study was discussed, with interesting commentary, in May 14 edition of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.

Books are easier to read than screens. This one is completely subjective, but I find that it's a lot more tolerable to stare at print for 8 hours straight than it is to stare at a CRT or LCD.
Actually, it's proven. There are plenty of studies showing that people read more slowly and less well on screen than on paper; every web author should know this!
Anyone vaguely interested might find this and this (the latter dates from 1997, so this has been known about for an eon or two in Internet time).

Books are easier to read than screens. This one is completely subjective, but I find that it's a lot more tolerable to stare at print for 8 hours straight than it is to stare at a CRT or LCD.
Actually, it's proven. There are plenty of studies showing that people read more slowly and less well on screen than on paper; every web author should know this!
Anyone vaguely interested might find this and this (the latter dates from 1997, so this has been known about for an eon or two in Internet time).

Jakob Nielsen has a very good impression on this.

He thinks this will finally bring micropayments into reality.
__

Browsing Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com, I found a link (2000-06-01) to a Flash-oriented site warning about bad uses of Flash, A Cancer on the Web called Flash . This warns about gurus starting to think that all Flash is evil.
__

There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

The Network Working Group is working on a replacement for URLs -- Uniform Resource Names. URNs are intended to serve as persistant, location-independent, resource identifiers and are designed to make it easy to map other namespaces (which share the properties of URNs) into URN-space.

Streaming television doesnt seem to be feasible to me. Since I am a web programmer, i do a lot of reading at Useit.com, which I'm sure many of you do as well. One of the articles says that most internet users won't have broadband until 2003, and some won't have it until 2008. So right now, AOL and local providers rule, with DSL and cable moving up the scale but not fast enough to keep up with the available media. And additionally, I think that making sure that a user is from Canada shouldn't be too hard. You just have all ISPs in Canada register their IP subdomain(s) with the company. Yes it would be tedious, but hey, it would work. If they are looking for a solution, there's one for you. I just hope they have the time and money to do it, not to mention the bandwidth...

Unless you expect people to NOT read your book, do not use PDF. PDF was designed so authors could write perfectly portable POSTSCRIPT and make it available online. PDF files have a few major setbacks:

• The version of Acrobat viewer that allows search is 2mb more download than the searchless version.
• Since Acrobat is made for print, you will not get whole books online in a readable format, unless you assume 1024x768 and a paperback 2 page per pdf page novel.
• monitors are only 72-100 dpi currently, where books are 300-750 dpi.
• Books don't glow.
• people rarely blink while reading online
• you will need to repurpose books for simple online formatting because of the above

Like I said PDF is for PRINT! So is postscript and DVI. until devices of high resolution with near zero brightness ratio appear, displays are going to create fatigue and frustration for the reader.

Tip o' th' hat to Jakob Nielsen: useit.com

Read what Jacob Neilson has to say about Micropayment. I reckon Nik is spot on this point, but it could be open to abuse - do you pay per listen or per track? What happens when you trade it to someone else? Can you sell it on etc?

Well, it isn't completely new, it's a dialect of XML.

My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")

The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.

The only guideline I know for network speed is Neilsen's Law, which is significantly slower than Moore's, and that only covers Internet bandwidth, not Wireless bandwidth. And screen size is fixed. If you don't think that calls for a different UI, try posting to /. off a cell phone.

I totally agree with you. IMHO all e-companies should read useit.com before they design WWW user interfaces. In the words of Jakob Nielsen: "The collapse of Boo does not prove that e-commerce doesn't work. It proves that overly fancy design doesn't work."

Jakob Nielsen already knows - In fact, he bids them a "good riddance" on his homepage.

How about being able to simulate a user? I know UseIt says that you don't need very many users to do testing, but most web pages can't afford to pay any, especially if they make a lot of revisions. At it's simplest form, the program would check that the fonts are big enough to read, none of the basic guidelines are violated (pop-ups, etc. check the questions for Jeff Zeldman for more ideas) and so on. Then, as the program progressed, it would watch users surf the web and try and figure out what kinds of things they did.

• Do they usually click on the bullets or the words?
• Do they bother scrolling down the page?
• Do they ever use the reset buttons in forms>

This way you'd be not only studying users actions, but creating a program that would learn from them to either formulate rules about usability or simulate a user itself.

On the client side there are lots of places where current technology could be expounded on. Internet Explorer (and other Microsoft software) tries to implement some basic tricks like URL completion, automated form completion, menu optimisation, evil paperclips, etc. Any one of these could have an entire thesis devoted to optimising it.

Granted, all of these can be done with statistical models. If you're not so interested in the math, figure out what neural nets or evolving software would be optimal at.

I agree.

If anyone's interested in the theory behind usability, I recommend this book on Human Computer Interaction as an introduction.

Also, here are some web-sites I found useful:

- Cooper design
Excellent collection of articles, case studies and, for students who want bullet-point summaries for ease of recall, a nice list of HCI design axioms. See in particular http://www.cooper.com/design/ where there is a series of articles, including one entitled "The myth of metaphor". Cooper is also the author of two excellent books on interface design.

- Ask Tog Design
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini developed the first version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines in 1978, moved to Sun, and is currently lead designer at Healtheon. He has published two excellent books on interface and software design and at this web site, he answers questions and discusses interface issues with wit and insight.

- Jacob Nielsen's website
Nielsen produces a bi-weekly column on web usability and has also just published a book called Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity which is getting rave reviews. He is widely regarded as a leader in the field of web site design and usability testing.

- Interface Hall of Shame
An excellent collection of scathing but accurate reviews of user interface disasters of one sort or another. The ultimate depressing experience for any interface designer must be to end up here.

- HCI Reading List
If you want an exhaustive list of HCI reading materials, this is a good place to look. It is reasonably up-to-date (Feb 98) and has useful comments on the majority of textbooks in this area.

- University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland conducts research on advanced user interfaces and their development processes. They study areas such as new approaches to information visualization, interfaces for digital libraries, multimedia resources for learning communities, zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), technology design methods with and for children, and instruments for evaluating user interface technologies. The director is Ben Schneiderman, author of the book "Designing the user interface".

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).
__

I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it,

Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?

the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.

I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.

And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.

As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?

I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.

Jay (=

I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it,

Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?

the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.

I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.

And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.

As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?

I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.

Jay (=

Nielsen himself has a great article about this topic, Novice vs. Expert Users, on his Web site.

You can also visit Nielsen's website, www.useit.com, which contains quite a lot of great articles on web usability.

At least, not always.

Many of the Web design sins described by JN - splash screens, excessive bandwidth requirements, lack of user-centric design - may stem from the fact that while the people who build Web sites have a good grasp of the issues, the people who sign off on them are often marketing types who don't. The senior management who sponsor major Web developments generally learned the ropes in completely different media, and old habits die hard. All too often the sign-off is contingent on meeting glitz-and-glamour quotas.

Cold, hard figures showing the very real dollar losses associated with poor usability is just as important as expounding design rules. Jakob's website provides such figures; I'm not sure whether the book does.

...all the papers on Jacob Nielson's site, be sure to do so. They are fantastic reads. Though I laughingly agree with a previous post that the colors on the cover are atrocious and painful to the eye, I think this is one author that makes a ton of sense when he talks about useability, testing, design, etc. Read it, share it, do it.

Jakob Nielsen put together the single best way to cover what constitutes an evaluation of an interface. I recommend strongly that each person developing any sort of system for anyone with any interface read it once.
-- The Hollow Man

Simplicity does not exclude complex functionality -- take the game of Go for example; you can learn the rules in a few minutes, but it takes a lifetime to master. A user should be able to sit down and start using the product (at least in a basic mode) with no training

Consistantcy is probably even more important: a program that performs similar operations in a consistantly bad manner is better than one that does those same operations in several different (but individually elegant) ways.

For extensive information on usability, visit Jakob Neilson's website useit.com.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

You have overlinked this article. Just because you know the URL of Linux doesn't mean you need to use it.

Billington has not identified the main problem with reading online. Jakob Nielsen has. The problem is that current screens have insufficient resolution and they cause eyestrain. Nielsen estimates that that problem will be solved within 5 years.

Anyone interested in designing usable cross-platform web pages should check out Dr. Jakob Nielsen's website UseIt. Wonderful content, textbook-perfect cross-platform html, but [IMHO] ugly as sin.

Another excellent site with more of a hands-on, tutorial approach is All Things Web. Very good content & asthetically pleasing to boot.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Not so much Diva as Prima Donna, perhaps?

The full paper is available from http://www.counterpane.com. <rant>Unfortunately, Bruce Schneier hasn't yet realized that PDF and Postscript are only appropriate for printing, not publishing on the Web</rant>.

I originally tried to put this in my own words, but I just couldn't do it any better than Jakob Nielson, so here's his take on this issue (his emphasis):

"The "paradox of the active user" is a concept introduced by John M. Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson (then at IBM, now at Virginia Tech) to explain a common observation in several user studies done at the IBM User Interface Institute in the early 1980s (later confirmed by many other studies, including my own): Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately. They are motivated to get started and to get their immediate task done: they don't care about the system as such and don't want to spend time up front on getting established, set up, or going through learning packages.

The "paradox of the active user" [PDF,66k] is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it. But that's not how people behave in the real world, so we cannot allow engineers to build products for an idealized rational user when real humans are irrational: we must design for the way users actually behave."

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ activeuserparadox.html

The paper is old, but still very relevant. It was written before Gooey Tarbabies achieved World Domination. I was really surprised to discover that many of my current user interface issues have actually been thoroughly documented and processes for (potentially) surmounting them outlined.

Why is it that since we've known about this for so long, so little apparent progress has been made?
My short 2bit answer is the evil upgrade treadmill - everybody is so busy preparing for and researching the Next Big Thing, they don't have time to refine and polish the tools already under our noses.

So, they say "hey, these people know what they are doing and can save us bandwidth money! hire 'em!" Imagine how wonderful the web would be if there weren't so much useless crap being sent around.

actually, it's a dream. let's be realistic, companies won't go catching 5k designers to save bandwidth. they care about content and design. about making people come back to the sites. too bad not everybody follows nielsen's reputation article. and sure, the web would be wonderful without so much "useless crap".

jaime g. wong
the Guidelight Project

"What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design."

I've just looked at Nielson's page on the top 10 mistakes in web design and one thing strikes me as slightly strange. His list of 'popular websites' (as opposed to 'prominent websites') is AOL.com, Yahoo, MSN, Go, GeoCities, Netscape, Excite, Microsoft, Lycos, and Angelfire. He says this about the 'popular websites'
It is not an accident that the sites with the most traffic have an uncommonly low rate of violations of the top ten mistakes of Web design. On the contrary, it is because these sites are easy to use that they get so much traffic.

Is it? Netscape's site is very hard to navigate. It gets a lot of hits because it's the default home page for Netscape's browsers. AOL, Microsoft and MSN probably also get large numbers of hits for the same reason. Microsoft must get lots of hits because it's Microsoft, not because it's site is minimalist. Most of the other popular sites are search engines/portals which again are hit because of their function, rather than their design. Having said that, I love Google's minimalist design.

He also says "I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results. The only data points we have say that it can't be done."
to which I say "MacOS X"

HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.

I read his link to his review of Companies' web sites that scored well against his top ten mistakes of web design. IBM scored first with a rating that represented that IBM's web site only violated the ten rules 11% of the time. I cannot believe this. I, an owner of an IBM computer, find their web site to be garbage. It is hard to navigate. The Aptiva link (for people with Aptiva computers who are looking for drivers) rarely works. The driver page usually refers you to another web site that no longer exists. And, most of all, it takes almost 20 minutes to navigate to the area where you can look for drivers.

I do not know what is happening with the world when IBM's (or 3com's) site is considered good.

Jeremy

Nielson's observations boil down to two axioms:

1. The longer your site takes to load, the greater the chance that someone's going to give up.
2. The more useful your site is to someone, the more likely they will come back.

Sure, users want to experience attractive websites, but it's much lower on the hierarchy of needs. If a pretty picture is keeping content from me (and is not, itself, the sought-after content), I'm going somewhere else.

"Nielsen's advice, while applicable to all web designers, tends to encourage to creation of look-alike e-commerce websites. The needs of a user buying stuff at E-Bay are different than a person checking out an online art gallery."

Remember that he is giving general advice; the most usable website for an amalgamated average of all users of the Web is probably a generic e-commerce site. (Since usability is directly proportional to profit for these sites, that's not surprising.)

Your point is well-taken, though -- different audiences will prefer different UI's, and sometimes the general rules don't apply. Ditto for different user tasks.

It would be instructive to see some field- and task-specific usability analyses on useit at some point.

"What the big sites have in common is that most of them got started on the web at an early stage."

Lots of entrepreneurs "got started on the web at an early stage" -- and aren't around today. The really big sites stuck around longer because they were more usable.

"The "big" sites maintain this advantage now through massive amounts of advertising. That's what big sites have in common these days. Yep, they all look like portals, but that's a fad thing, not a design consideration."

I actually don't like portals very much (I usually ignore 80% of the page once I can find the "search" blank), but that is just one page out of the site -- albeit a big one. Where e-commerce sites deliver is on their catalog and ordering pages. Making someone feel secure with your credit card number is no mean feat.

Advertising actually is something that counteracts usability to an extent. However, remember the old lesson of Maapo cereal -- advertising gets the first visit, but not all the rest.

phil

you can read his web site ate www.useit.com

It sometimes seems as though you at least tacitly support the idea of 'taming' the Internet and abolishing the freedom, self-regulation and technology that is laid bare for all to see and to understand if they choose to, handing over control to centalized authorities, presumably government and/or big business. I'd be interested in knowing explicitly how you see the network and how, if at all, to reconcile usability issues with the freedom, decentralization and technical transparency that are such important parts of the Internet to many of us.

I have read your column "URL as UI" and Tim Berners-Lee's about Cool URIs.

What do you think about Berners-Lee's recommendation to keep extensions off URL (I see you site uses .html)? And the rest of the T B-L's comments?


--

• Q1. How well in your opinion does slashdot rate as a study of usability and site design?
  Q2. What are the areas that need attention?
  
  I ask this because the code for the slashdot site, (slashcode) is open sourced and many (new) developers use slashdot as a guide for developing their own sites.

Whups. Found it (although it wasn't easy).
Here is the example and methodology for Intranet organization.
Here is a less specific document about Intranet portals.

1) Would the user want to book mark the information in the right hand frame? If IE 5 is your standard browser this is not an issue.

2) Would anyone want to send a url that links to one page on the right hand side of the app? For instance the help desk might want to send an email saying the new customer form is here http://ourbox/ourapp/newcust.html

3) If some one does link to the right hand page of the app with out the enclosing frame does it still work? see Java Docs with Frames. They uses frames but if you direct link to the main content area it is still useable see: Java Docs No Frames

4) What is the impact of frames on printing information form your app

These are some of the questions you would need to answer before you can say that your app is an exception to the rule that frames suck most of the time. -Peace Dave

My question: do you see any emerging conventions for form fill-in? (Highlighting erroneous fields, allowing corrections, etc.)

Anyway, my question. Since the study showed -- and you seem to concur -- that older people and less-educated people are the least likely to be using the internet, these groups could be considered the biggest "growth markets" for e-commerce companies. However, it seems that the techniques necessary to appeal to these two groups would be significantly different. How do you see internet companies trying to appeal to these "new" demographics (if at all) to increase their market share in the next few years?