I’m a long time Apple fan, but the system they created for checking iPhone availability is a complete disaster. The way they have it set up sounds really great. You go online to apple.com/retail after 9pm each night and check your closest store and the next closest group for availability the next day. The problem is the stores don’t get shipments at the end of the day. They get shipments at some point during the day and put the phones on sale. Therefore when the website told me that my store would not have iPhones tomorrow, that was not true. Then they inevitably sell out of the phones before closing and once again at 9pm when you check the site it says they will have no iPhones the next day.

The situation Apple has created for themselves is that they only way to determine if your store has stock is to either go to the store, or more likely call them constantly to find out if they have gotten a shipment. This has got to be really fun for the employees at the store!

There is a simple fix for this situation. All the stores have to do is keep the shipments that they get during the day in the back until the following day. Then at 9pm the site would be correct in saying the the store will have iPhones in stock the next day. That way you don’t have to call the store, and if you really want a phone, you can show up when the store opens and your likely to get one. This is a simple fix. I would have expected more from Apple.

This weekend I played around with my Mint account and part of the setup included me tying in my 401k program which is managed by Paychex. Mint just couldn’t connect to Paychex so I decided to visit the site to find out what’s the deal.

I was greeted by this atrocity.

I partly want to commend the designers for trying something new, but this isn’t the site to try that on. The audience here isn’t likely to be tech savvy or frequent visitors; two criteria I would look for when trying out a new interface direction.

Users are familiar with entering a username and password but an image is pushing it. 6 hours after selecting my image I came back to the site to write this post and I forgot my image already. Who has a favorite image? My question to Paychex; why not just use a CAPTCHA here? They are becoming widely used and more and more people are becoming familiar with them.

Here’s a suggestion. Use reCAPTCHA if you don’t want to create this yourselves, but please get rid of this image option for “added security.” While you are at it, make the whole UI of the benefits section more usable.

It seems that the notoriously tightwad ICANN is now relaxing domain naming conventions. Now any combination of letters, numbers and non-Latin text will be able to resolve to a Web site. Personally, I think this is a serious mistake.

There already are plenty of domain name suffixes to select from but time and time again .COM is the most selected suffix. It’s what people know and they are used to. I remember a few years ago there was a huge stink over whitehouse.com going to a porn site rather then to a government site. Those who understood domain names would have gone to .GOV. At the time there were only a handful of suffixes to choose from, this new direction by ICANN will change all that.

Personally, I think this adds more confusion to domain names. I already see plenty of challenges, even with technical folks understanding the differences in subdomains such as blog.imulus.com vs imulus.com vs www.imulus.com. Usually there is a 50 / 50 chance that if I give someone a domain name containing a subdomain they will usually add www to the URL; for instance bet.rmi.org then becomes www.bet.rmi.org.

This will surely benefit search engines more then the average user. I guess the lawyers benefit also because it sure will be interesting to watch the copyright and trademark lawsuits for all the domain name variations which will be gobbled up by the name registers.

Nice move ICANN!

Netflix recently announced that they are eliminating the Profiles feature from their online movie rental service. For a company that built it’s business on customer service, this is a seriously bonehead move. For families or small businesses this was the feature that made the service work for them. Without it, it isn’t a very good solution at all. I can only assume that some bean counters at Netflix think that all those profile users are now going to have to signup for a full account and they will increase their profits. On the contrary, this is going to make the service unusable for a lot of people and they will try something else. If Blockbuster can add profiles they will destroy Netflix. If you want to voice your opinion, I suggest you email Netflix and sign the petition here: http://www.savenetflixprofiles.com/

Update: Netflix has reversed their policy on this topic and will be keeping profiles for single accounts. This is wonderful, and a great example of users making their voice heard. Way to support and respect your users Netflix!

As many of you have probably noticed, a huge design trend these days is the infamous reflection. I am not ashamed to say that I am probably one of the biggest fans of this style. However, I am not a huge fan of throwing perspective out the window. What I mean by this is if you are going to use reflections, you should understand how something would reflect if it was a physical 3d object.

Too often do I see images that are robotically flipped, rotated and opacity-ed but the designer doesn’t take perspective into consideration. If the object is 3d, this tactic doesn’t work mainly because the surface should reflect the planes of the object.