Lately I’ve been bothered by inefficient user interfaces (perhaps it’s just a theme lately given my “dysfunction function” post previously).  My job is web-based and I understand – to a degree – that some things are hard to change and takes some time to program.  But format and text are perhaps some of the easiest things we can offer to the user.

My first example in this series of posts will be business e-letters.  Letters that have important information, but don’t easily convey to the user exactly what s/he wants to know are inefficient and confusing.  An electronic billing statement is a great example for variability in bad and good design.