Jakob Nielsen ranks Wufoo, Sugarsync and Xero among 10 Best Application UIs of 2008 | Hacker News Reader

Jakob Nielsen ranks Wufoo, Sugarsync and Xero among 10 Best Application UIs of 2008

useit.com

47 pointsjoseakle16 comments

Why doesn't he include links to the products? I don't understand. Isn't that un-usable? And screenshots of how each app uses the said components would've been nice. I don't want to create accounts on each just to see whether or not they use the ribbon, lightbox, etc.

Here are the links:

Products with demos

CmsBox http://www.cmsbox.com/en/system/demos

FotoFlexer http://fotoflexer.com/demos.php

PrismaPrepare http://www.oce.com/en/Software/prismaprepare/default.htm click on start product presentation.

SQL Diagnostic Manager http://www.idera.com/Products/Tour.aspx?id=24

SugarSync http://www.sugarsync.com/ click on watch video.

SuperSaas http://www.supersaas.com/info/demos

Wufoo http://wufoo.com/tour/

Xero http://www.xero.com/overview/dashboard/

Products without demos

EyeBlaster Campaign Monitor http://www.eyeblaster.com/products/campaign_monitor.asp

Seating Management http://www.themagellannetwork.com/pages/products.html

Way to go, Wufoo! We've all known that those guys are awesome at usability, but it's cool to see the usability guru himself explain what makes it great.

Wufoo is basically the best UI for form building ever created.

I'm curious: what's the rationale for not being able to play with Wufoo without signing up (for a free account)? Was it found to be more effective to require some (minor) commitment from the user?

Early on, time was the limiting factor. The builder has been rewritten now to be standalone, so we will soon be testing the difference between current conversion rates of having to create an account and the rates that come as a result of playing with the builder first without an account. If we find anything interesting, we'll make note on Particletree.

I have heard that many times, so I finally decided to check it out. There is a lot of movement/animation on every page, and most of it is pretty unnecessary.

Other than that, it wasn't that bad. I'm curious what my thoughts would be if I actually visited the site with the intention of creating a form, which obviously is the only real test that matters.

Plus they have stellar customer service. We were talking to Kevin Hale last night (he's visiting Boston to advise the new startups), and he said that during the day their average response time to support emails is about 5 minutes.

Would you mind saying that again as a Disqus comment here? http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=m6/8p/thpb.jpg...

I'd like to collect cool and useful things people remember about last night's event, not just pictures.

The winners are:

- Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.

- CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.

- FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.

- PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.

- Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.

- SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.

- SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.

- SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.

- Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.

- Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

Nice to see CMSBox there. it uses the Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside stack. http://www.cmsbox.com/en/system/technology

"Many winners conducted field studies or other forms of contextual research in the workplace. After all, when you're designing mission-critical software for print shops, you need to move your precious behind out of the office and into some real print shops."

And that's exactly what I did with my startup :-P

At my first development job, I spent a week on the shop floor with the users of our software. I got to see how people actually used the software, and where in their workflow their actions were due to limitations of the program rather than any part of the underlying activity. Afterwards I had a much better feel for how the software worked and how it was being used. Our user experience definitely benefited.

This is intreguing. I look forward to REALLY getting into the report. I wish that they also listed ALL the web applications they reviewed. It'd probably be a tedius read, but it would be interesting to know where things like Tumblr and Wordpress fit in... amongst many others obviously.

When you are finished reading the report, can you sell me your copy? I am interested in it too but not $98.00 interested.

Xero looks fantastic - just what I need but for the security implications. I can't see myself ever being confortable for handing off control of the data that is most important in my life except to someone with whom I have a solid personal relationship.

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