Jakob Neilsen has written about the 10 best application UIs of 2008. And NZ-made Xero comes in at #10! First of all, congratulations to Xero, the Team and Rod Drury!
Neilsen is recognized as one of the leading usability, analysis and UI design experts in the world. So his recognition of Xero, from little old NZ, is significant. He went one step further and used Xero as an example of how to implement lightboxes / modal dialogues well. He also gave Xero extra kudos for the emotional design, given that Xero targets a traditionally 'dry' audience:
"Does Open Source Have Commercial Viability?" is a response to my review of Xero.com by Stuart Bale, Product Manager at MYOB. Today he left a comment to let me know about it.
Xero is another accounting application that competes with the likes of Quicken and MYOB. It isn't the first application-as-a-service in this market, but it is, IMO the best.