I just received an email from 38 degrees asking me to vote on which action the government should take to mitigate the effects of deep cuts to public services (see screenshot).

Fair enough... it strikes me as pretty odd that the previous government's spending policy is being blamed for financial crisis that was really caused by risky financial instruments.

However, in asking for a vote from a user, they've presented the existing voting at the point of voting. I can imagine this does encourage people to vote, but it will also be influencing what they vote for: people naturally go for options that they see other people taking, not exactly fair.

You could easily be swayed away from the issue you felt strongly about just by seeing what everyone else is doing.

Very strange. I was trying to register for the London Cycle Hire access scheme, and obviously, I'd rather not have to renew my account every time I use it.

The registration form presented me with the auto-renew option, but greyed-out. I got very confused, and didn't bother reading the text underneath it, which points out that you can't use the option until you're registered....

So why present the option if you can't use it?? There's usually something you can remove from a design to make it better.

I've just been sent an email about a tariff change to my iphone contract: bad news apparently, they're ditching unlimited data. There was a link in the email to a PDF that describes how the new pricing works. I've screengrabbed a bit of the PDF.

Can anyone figure out the new pricing without tilting their head? I suppose you could print it... but that rather defeats the point of this whole computer business doesn't it?

I've recommended dropbox to a lot of people, but groups who start using it usually end up wondering if they can really afford to pay quite so much for every single user ($99 p/a).

When exploring the pricing on their site, I came across this voting system. I hope they act on it: its a great way to keep your users happy.

Users don't care about an artist's tour dates in general when searching, they only care about the ones that apply to them.

I've been waiting for something like this for a while, although I've no idea why it thinks I'm in Crowthorne, or where that is! Upcoming and last.fm do something similar, but you need to be quite invested already to be notified.

Lovely IxD. Clicking that Sign Up button reveals a form sliding up from below.

Right now I'm thinking.... is that really all you want from me to register? One form field?

Brilliantly minimal signup process.

Nice work dharmafly and OKFN! I do love treemaps, one of the best ways to explore the relative size of things (like files on your hard disk, for example). http://assets.dharmafly.com/widgets/coins/fullscreen.html

I'd love to see more levels of data to this, but you can only go one level down. I presume that has more to do with available data than application; I wanted to compare education to defence, but I believe education is hidden with Local Authorities.

I like the emboldening to highlight what's required (although I wonder how it compares to the usual asterisk in testing), and the bracket as a reminder of what these details are for (billing).

This wouldn't work if it wasn't relevant content. I'm not sure it is in this case, but it certainly got my attention.

What I find slightly funny about this is that its designed to grab your attention away from the related links (which do the same thing), almost like they know there's too much on the page, and this is a bit of a hack.