Case Study #3 — Pacific Life Reed was chosen by Avanade to design two applications; one Windows Rich-Media application and one Web application, both for internal company use, and to formulate standards for both and write the UI Standards documentation. The project was completed in a few days over one month. During the process, Reed was asked to analyze an existing application and provide Pacific Life management some reasons why the application design was so disliked by its users. While time would not allow an in-depth evaluation, the results underscored basic usability principles. Here are the results: The application was ugly! Colors were unattractive and the layout was not conducive to the important work the application needed to accomplish. The application contained about 60 objects such as buttons, links, tabs, utilities, and the like, but those 60 objects had nearly 130 names! This inconsistency made the users uneasy about using the objects. The application misplaced System and Action buttons. It is a self-evident truth that there are two different kinds of buttons in any application. The names don't matter too much, but one kind of button does things on the page, the other kind of button moves the user through a process, usually taking the process to a new page or view. Typically these buttons are called Action and System buttons in that order. Action buttons are usually placed from the left side of the page towards the middle of the page depending on the visual design, while System buttons are placed only on the right side and/or at the bottom of the page. This application misplaced these buttons frequently and greatly contributed to user unease; users could not tell for sure what might happen on exercising controls, a particularly egregious error when combined with naming inconsistency. The BenCalc main page, designed by Reed per Pacific Life web standards