This ease-of-use study of e-commerce sites leaves me thinking "shoppers need to get anywhere from anywhere" - implying the need for a completely non-linear navigation method. Conceptually I'm thinking about this as a star configuration where the user is always at the center of the star and can get anywhere from that point (within one, maybe two clicks). Once they move, then their new position becomes the center of the star. This is basically an excercise in validating the navigation; at every stage you check to see if all the points of the star are available.

This version of the Webinator does display the search results on the Thunderstone servers, but I get to customize the header and footer and control the indexing. And no other junk is displayed on the page (like ads, which a lot of other free search engines do). They also pattern the functionality after Infoseek's engine, a nice model to follow.

...Linux, on the other hand, is a double disaster. It is a disaster, first, because having two major windowing systems, each with infinite customizability, in a system designed for building major mission-critical applications is just stupid. Second, it is a disaster because the Linux community is blissfully unaware that there is even a problem.

See a bit of the future: virtual RFPs and real-world bids.

If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can't compete without offering features. It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it's too expensive and partly because ordinary people can only learn so much.

So if you don't have to invent new interfaces all the time, it's not expensive to invent one good one and evolve it over time. This also keeps people from having to learn so much. People have already learned (and GUI designers have already created) several kinds of interfaces: the desktop metaphor (windows), menu-driven, telephone keypads, etc. Programmers can leverage these existing designs and source code to lower costs and customers can leverage existing knowledge to ease the learning curve.

Robert Moric points out some fascinating issues with the Gates' residence and Bill himself admits it ain't perfect.

This is one way I explain how an enterprise-only product like Lotus Notes fails to demonstrate the same refinements over time as Microsoft Office. Notes is reviewed in Enterprise media like Network Computing which, because their audience is System Administrators, has to place emphasis on performance and administration over usability. Oblivious to the criticism they deserve, Lotus demonstrates their misguided conception of how people work on their web site:

You've left yourself extra time to become familiar with Notes R5. You arrive at work early. You've got a meeting first thing, but you've left yourself extra time to become familiar with Notes R5. You'll be happy if in an hour, you can bring up Notes and check your calendar for where your morning planning meeting is being held.

• OS companies have more R&D money to devote than web designers typically do, so proper usability tests can be performed
• OS conventions are so widespread people tend to know these UI conventions
• The best of each os is copied by each other os (while Microsoft used to steal from Apple now we see Apple stealing small elements from Microsoft, possibly using this same reasoning that I'm using).

They could take a lesson from Salon and visually separate the ads from the content, making both easier to absorb.

Death only occurs within the perspective of a single person; humanity continually generates itself, the world evolves, the universe retains balance. If we rise above our own pithy perspective then death fails to scare us and ceases to be the cause of our inhibition.

The Good Gray Poet elequently says:

... The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end
      to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

            - Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

In the past they earned trust by concentrating on one industry, personal finance, along with better than average reporting. Fast forward to April 1999 and Gomez has expanded into "your shopping-bidding-trading on-the-web advisor." I believe they had potential to expand into other e-commerce segments such as travel planning and still retain their trusted status. But as they try to encompass the entire shopping arena their focus becomes blurry. Their shopping offerings are sparse, lack depth, and vary widely.

Julio Gomez, formerly of Forrester Research, goes beyond the Forrester model of merely analyzing and goes on to rank and recommend, a commendable approach. But if this Consumer Reports-style analysis is to work they must build the respect Consumer Reports has by shunning advertising. In that scenario that are faced with either releasing a paper edition or selling subscriptions, two questionable business propositions. So instead Gomez is selling ads on their site (in one case to a company included in their online broker rankings - "Mr. Stock") and hoping we'll continue to put our trust in them. I don't think they'll go as far as Consumer Reports with this approach.

SIDEBAR: Because I feel uneasy ranting without providing solutions, I'll say that the community model could work well for Gomez. While Gomez has a section called "Community" it is really just a message board, which too often becomes an outlet for frustrated customers instead of intelligent dialog (see related comments on Yahoo! in my 4-1-1999 entry). A good example of community done right is the photo.net site. The primary difference is the aspect of interaction: at photo.net the moderators and contributors all interact with each other whereas the Gomez visitors merely leave a bit of knowledge behind. There's no forum for Gomez members to ask questions (or criticize the reviews).

I believe the community model can coexist with advertising without a conflict of interests, as long as the moderators stay moderators and do not become editors.

• They give meaning to statistics by identifying trends in financial reports by using robust charting tools.
• By focusing on technical analysis they differentiate themselves and avoid the ambiguity associated with fundamental analysis.
• They include a crucially important education section by explaining everything so well that the complex is made simple. Whoever you are there is some higher level of financial analysis or service that can make you money but which you don't understand. In the financial industry, education is what everyone wants yet not all companies provide well (although DLJDirect is praised as an online broker, their site doesn't even tell you the difference between buying a stock short or long).
• They take their audience seriously without taking themselves too seriously. Everything about the site is customer-focused, and the Clearstation "Core" management personally post their own stock picks, admitting when they made a wrong turn and explaining how you can learn from their mistakes.
• They offer a good return (in the form of knowledge) on investment (of your time) largely because people contribute their own comments to the site there's a large repository of intellectual capital. Yet because an investment of time is required of members they avoid the low signal-to-noise ratio of Yahoo!'s financial community, which suffers from drive-by stupidity.