Absolutely useless, but I just had to do it.

MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes is another one of those rating applications, this along the lines of selecting one of your photos and then matching it to a celebrity in their database. After you have selected the celebrity, other users get to vote on a scale of one to ten how close you resemble that celebrity.

It’s a basic application: just another form of Hot or Not, substituting a look alike to how hot you are. The only real option is to keep viewing people. The application also has a few nifty features, like morphing your photo into a celeb and then posting it to your profile.

Their. database is pretty large — it seems to contain over 1,000 images to select from — and the face recognization technology they have built into Flash is pretty good, and the usability of the application is also very well done because it has all the little details that many of the MySpace applications are missing, like hover over effects and indication of state. A nice feature would be selecting from a list of a friends and doing a separated by birth joke.

If they actually built advertising into this, there could be some advertising opportunities, and this application does link to a paid service, creating your online family tree so there has been some thought put into this.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability:5
• Fun Factor: 3
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 3

I joined a gym, and did it online. I like the 24 Hour Fitness site because I was able to join online and not deal with any pesky salespeople trying to sell me a plan I didn’t want, and it was a fairly easy process to join. I need notice a couple of items I would change if I were in charge of their website:

Personalization

I came in as a member, and those links showed up. They should be replaced with links that are appropriate to me as an audience. Off that page, I would also make getting to the online store more obvious.

Non-Standard Credit Card And Information Forms

This is the join form, but this also appears in the credit card form — the form required you to enter your month (May, November, September) instead of selecting it from a drop down menu or entering a number. It might seem clever, but every other form of this type I’ve seen has been entering a date as numbers and not as a text item.

You have to really do things people expect, and this is outside the lines. If 80 percent of the forms out there require thing, there better be a really good reason to do it different, and there really isn’t a good reason to do it different here. I wonder: did they do any usability testing?

One note: If you are designing forms for an international audience, the format of the date for most countries is day, month, and year.