Archive for Usability
I recently was talking to some friends about the current state of browsers and operating systems and how the next year or two could really shake up what’s been traditionally considered the norm. You know, the IE sucks, Chrome is the fastest and most standard-compliant browser, OS X has the best usability and Windows is for the plebes mode of thinking that people have fallen into. It’s an easy mode to get used to, but that could be changing.
First, here’s some benchmarks from September 27th from Lifehacker. There’s an article about a very promising IE10, then there was a follow-up two days later about the upcoming Opera build.
As for Windows 8, here’s a good video from June demoing some features and the updated UI (the Internet’s Wadsworth Constant applies, so feel free to skip to 30% in).
Granted, until you use it yourself, it’s hard to say what the truth is when updates are announced. Personally, I thought the iPad UI seemed silly because it was just a spread out iPod/iPhone UI with wasted space, but using it is still really nice. So, we’ll see how things change.
November 21, 2011
A recent post by Tim Peter about designing for a certain browser got me thinking about design and usability and the current state of the browser wars.
Tim argues that instead of looking at what the general market trends in browser usage is, you should look at what the usage of your users are. I completely agree with that sentiment.
Given the current state of modern browsers, however, there is very little reason that your website design and development can’t support the majority of browsers. There might be slight display issues in some cases, but the big hitters: IE7/IE8/IE9, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, are all relatively easy to support. Of course, there are occasional bugs here and there (I’m looking at you IE7) that require special attention (and often additional hair-pulling), there is little reason beyond working with some intense JavaScript or cutting-edge CSS3/HTML5 features that your website will not work in the above browsers.
Once that’s accomplished, it becomes a business decision how far you want to go to support less common situations or exotic browsers or antiquated browsers (hey, IE6). Just like how how much A/B testing you do becomes a business decision, how much cross-browser compatibility your company is going to pursue is also a business decision.
April 4, 2011
I recently read Nudge, a book that covered some really interesting cases of how people can be affected simply by the way a choice is presented to them.
In the case of software, this is a tremendous issue. How many people use the default theme in Chrome or Firefox? How many people have the grass background in Windows?
Those are certainly mundane examples that matter very little to a user, but there are certainly other cases where the default does change their experience. Take signing up for a newsletter, for example. Or getting notified when there are additional comments on a blog post. Those choices will greatly affect a user’s experience with that piece of software.
Much of Nudge discusses giving people the option to control their environment and what they want should they want to make an explicit choice. Otherwise, give them a default that will most likely work best for them and educate them about the possibilities out there and what’s available.
For software, do you make your default something that will make your company money right now? Or money in the long term? Or promote customer retention and recommendations?
Ultimately, those are business decisions. Though, personally, I think it’s always clear that those last goals go hand-in-hand.
March 30, 2011
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