Last night, I watched the season premier of Heroes. Sprint is one of the corporate sponsors, and they’ve paid for some product placements in the show itself. But at one point, they crossed the line into the ridiculous. While walking around in a remote part of Africa, one character asked another if he could use […]

Most car commercials contain footage of the car driving around in nice scenery. Recently, I noticed that the scenery seems to vary based on the geographic area where you’re watching the ad. This should come as no surprise — after all, winter driving scenes don’t make much sense in Florida. But I think there’s more […]

Lately, I’ve noticed that more and more blogs have stopped putting a date on their articles. It’s not on the top of the page, on the bottom of the page, or even in the URL itself. Why are they doing this? My best guess is to make the article look more “fresh” to people who […]

A few years ago, I started receiving a business magazine that I never subscribed to. It was free, so I didn’t think much of it. But once the “subscription” ran out, they started asking me to renew by filling out an information card. They didn’t want money, just more info about me. Since I never […]

DVD menus contain some of the worst user interfaces you’re ever likely to see. Their designers always seem to place form before function, and even then, the resulting product looks cheesy and primitive. In this article, I’d like to examine what websites would look like if they were created like DVDs. Here are some examples: […]

I’ve noticed something funny about printer-friendly pages. Whether they’re created with separate templates or simply generated on the fly with CSS, they don’t always print very smoothly. In fact, some of them crash my browser every time. This raises the question: why aren’t these problems being caught in the testing process? Even if printable pages […]

Not too long ago, virtually every e-commerce site required you to register before making a purchase. Then, someone had the smart idea to allow “guest” transactions, so you could buy products or complete other tasks without fussing with the registration process. From what I understand, offering the guest option leads to happier customers and more […]

A few days ago, Amazon notified me that my recurring order had been “cancelled successfully”. However, I never asked them to cancel the order. What they were really trying to say was quite different: they stopped carrying the product. In an unrelated incident, my credit card company notified me that the extra card on my […]

One of my favorite blogs structures their articles around a recurring set of topics, sort of like how newspapers have certain columns that repeat on a weekly basis. The blog even incorporates the day of the week into their post titles, e.g. “Fun Facts Monday”. This works great from the reader’s point of view, since […]

– Why don’t clothing stores have an express line? – If a store only has baskets and no shopping carts, do people buy less each trip, but come back more often? – If giving out free bags costs money, why don’t more stores sell reusable ones with their name on them? I don’t have the […]