While it is good that you kept the UI very lean, you would probably benefit from having a UI/UX guy help you with making the app feel a bit more 'dressed up'. Currently this looks like a developer designed it (I should know, I suffer from the same problem).
Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean big long blobs of text that explain the law in detail. On each form page you could display the relevant explainations, and then compile that into a searchable index, and even use that on dedicated pages for SEO purposes.
Oh and maybe you wanna say 'the easy way [to do your taxes]', rather than 'an easy way'.
By 'dressed up', I mean choose a set of colors (say 3) and use them for recurring elements in your pages (titles, questions, etc). Try to use colors and white space to visually separate questions, rather than borders (ex: the legend tag uses borders).
Use colored backgrounds to give a sense of vertical space. Also, most sites have a footer, that helps give a sense of space too.
I personnaly would stay away from using yellow/blue/pink/green on the same page (at 1:00 in the video).
I can send you my email, but I don't see yours in your profile either :p
Well, to share my own use case. I clicked the big, "Start your Tax return for free" assuming, it would provide me some information before I joined the site. When it didn't, I looked for the FAQ section at the footer, instinctively, but I didn't find it there. I wanted to know more about the site, before I give you my info. Yet even after creating an account, I need to go back to the home page to look at the FAQ! I hope you are getting what I meant here.
You could allow access to that link about 5 times. After that, display a link that says something along the lines of "Thanks for using us. This link has been used 5 times already. If you wish to access it again, click here and we will send you an email with another authorization code (or whatever)".
That way your users don't lose access to their stuff, and you can keep track of abuse. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing.
Yep the server dude went to bed. haha. but we'll try to do some more testing and see where we can optimize both in frontend and backend. And of course tell you what we find out…
As a foreigner who never had to pay for his education (provided for free by the government), I find it disheartening to see that no one (even here) brings up the issue that everyone should have access to education. Some kid whose only fault was to be born in a poor family should have access to the same opportunities as another one born in a richer family.
This is destroying the fabric of society if you ask me: poor people don't get educated and are getting poorer.
Maybe you'll call my point of view 'socialist', who cares. It just makes me sad that everyone takes the fact that college tuitions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for granted.
That's not really how it works. The more poor, the more financial aid is available. And one of the things we're implicitly calling into question is how many people need or even can benefit from a $200K college degree.
If you're just getting the new replacement for a high school degree, say the generic business degree, you can go to lower tier state colleges for quite reasonable sums of money.
"The more poor, the more financial aid is available".
Why isn't everyone able to go to an ivy league school then? Your statement implies that by being poor, you get lots of free money, which is basically saying there's nothing below the middle class. I think _that_ is not how it works.
Also, what if you don't want just "the new replacement for a high school degree"? My point exactly: why should you have to shoot for a lower degree because you're poor?
Hga is right about the vast sums of financial aid being given to those with low family income by top schools. Everyone isn't going to an Ivy league school because (1) clearly there aren't enough spaces, and (2) everyone isn't admitted. We could discuss the structural features that contribute to 1 and 2 (mostly 2). But where I think we should be able to find agreement is that those who are admitted are cared for quite well. You might be surprised at how many of them did indeed qualify for, and receive, need-based aid.
I don't doubt a lot of money goes into allowing some people into ivy league schools. But why should that counterbalance the fact that if you're born poor then chances are you won't go to college, especially a good one?
In the end, some especially gifted, smart or hard-working kids will make it, sure. But they'll be competing for the same financial aid. Why should those have to work any harder than the rest?
They're competing for the same financial aid, which is based on need. Admissions aren't tied to need, but aid is. Therefore, if you ignore the structural forces making it difficult for poor people in general, they get a big bonus:
(1) Ability to pay is ignored during admissions...
(2) ... but ability to pay totally determines what you'll be asked to pay.
For those who get admitted and are poor, it's an extraordinarily good deal. I'm still not seeing where (or if) we're disagreeing.
It's true that college admissions in the USA are extremely generous, but this is only to make up for the wild variations in the quality of primary and secondary education. Depending on your choice of parents (and where they live), you could be doing AP calculus with your own laptop, or not be able to read your high school diploma.
In many European countries, there is an aggressive policy of equalizing all education opportunity, from kindergarten to the Ph.D. level.
The eco-friendliness of a car does not come down to its MPG only. You also need to look at how much greenhouse (and other) gases come out from the combustion. New cars tend to do better.
But on the other hand, building a new car requires lots of energy, so maybe in the end we're better off driving old ones... ? It's all so complex, I don't know what to think, personally!
If we're talking about greenhouse gases, then MPG is the only important measure. For one, the vast majority of the gases coming out of the tailpipe are going to be CO2 and H2O (aside from pre-existing constituents of the atmosphere). All of the other gases aren't going to have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect.
So to a very close first approximation: MPG = carbon emission per mile = greenhouse impact per mile.
Indeed, a more polluting vehicle (say a really dirty old diesel engine) would if anything have less of an effect on the greenhouse. Since it's particulate emissions would promote an offsetting cooling effect.
Are you certain about that? I know a car emits much more CO2 and H2O than most anything else, but as an example, I was pretty sure the smog over L.A. was a direct result of oxides of nitrogen. Or was that only toxic, and not greenhouse, and thus not part of our consideration?
According to http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05004.htm cars also produce significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are both greenhouse gases. However good old CO2 represents 94-95 percent of the greenhouse potential from your average car.
So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.
Nitrogen oxides are both toxic and greenhouse gases, but in the quantities that they're emitted from tailpipes, the toxicity is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect.
I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. changing the washer’s settings does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective.
Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized.
[1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you?
[2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C.
[3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
Changing from washing in hot to washing in cold? That's all I can figure. If that is indeed the case one should wash in cold AND line dry their clothes.
Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean big long blobs of text that explain the law in detail. On each form page you could display the relevant explainations, and then compile that into a searchable index, and even use that on dedicated pages for SEO purposes.
Oh and maybe you wanna say 'the easy way [to do your taxes]', rather than 'an easy way'.