BretWagner.com

My wife and I just fin­ished our taxes.  It was a hard pill to swal­low know­ing we weren’t going to get a refund this year.

What made it a bit eas­ier, how­ever, was the redesigned user inter­face for Tax­cut.  I’ve used Tax­cut every year since grad­u­at­ing from col­lege and found each year to be an improve­ment over the last. This year’s Tax­cut is par­tic­u­larly impres­sive.  They’ve sim­pli­fied their helpers, refined their UI, and made it slightly more bear­able to com­plete my tax forms.

Just for fun, I like to look at the actual 1040 along­side Taxcut’s work­sheets. It helps me to appre­ci­ate the soft­ware for what it does — sim­plify a tan­gled mess of crap.  Look at the tax­code and try to under­stand which work­sheets go with which forms, and what lines need to be filled out when.  It’s awful.

Take a look at what Alan Siegel had to say about poorly designed legal doc­u­ments. I won­der what Alan would have to say about 1040’s.

I’ve been scour­ing the web lately for exam­ples of excel­lent ecom­merce web sites and stum­bled on Cart­Craze and Cart­Frenzy. They have some awe­some exam­ples of what good ecom­merce design is. Some of my favorites:

• http://www.vitradirect.com
• http://www.nest-living.com
• http://www.equipyourtrip.com/

All are incred­i­bly clean designs, strong lines and plenty of white­space to pre­vent visual over­load and make it eas­ier to peruse the cat­a­log. I espe­cially like Vit­raDi­rect. They have some great flex­i­bil­ity in the design… I could see this mak­ing a great Dru­pal theme.