First, sorry for my absence of late. Sadly I've not been relaxing at the beach or touring Europe... we've been short-staffed at the office and much of my downtime has been devoted to finding a new place to live. I have been working behind the scenes though and for those who've been waiting, search design part four is well under way. Now on to other issues...

Getting back to basics

I was speaking last week with a very nice woman at UC Berkeley who seemed a little surprised when I mentioned that I'd just finished re-reading Donald Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" aka DOET. Why re-read it? Well I personally think it's just a good read, but more than that, I look at it as a kind of outlook "reset" button.

The more commercialized the Web becomes, the more design decisions are based on advertising and marketing needs, the more designers and developers are inundated with and wowed by new technologies and evolving standards, the easier it is to push aside, to forget, to not have time for the very goal toward which we should all be striving no matter what side of those issues we stand on: Making our information/services/products easily accessible to potential users. If we do that well, everything else will fall into place.

Where does Norman fit in? DOET (formerly POET) does a tremendous job of putting you in the right frame of mind for design. I promise. I'd recommend a re-read to everyone. And if you haven't read it the first time: Drop what you're doing, head to the nearest library, do not pass go.

Other books I suggest revisiting often: Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" (Web specific) and Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics"

Do we really hate Microsoft?

I have as much mistrust and conflicting reliance on/resentment of Gates & Co. as any self-respecting open-standards proponent who is not ambitious enough to build her own Linux-based OS or rich enough to justify shelling out the cash to replace the XP that came with her Dell.

But I still tend to use Internet Explorer when I surf and I'm not sure exactly why.

I actually think Opera is the best browser on the market except for its pesky price tag (or the ad in lieu of it that takes up too much of my vertical space). I know it's not much money in the grand scheme of things and I'm sure I'll buy out the ad eventually, but when you're staring down tens of thousands of student loan debt it seems silly to pay anything to make your browsing experience 10 percent better. Well, to me it does.

And Netscape 7.0, well really all Mozilla-based browsers definitely have their positive qualities but still a few too many bothersome problems:

a) They can't seem to remember what user profile to assign so I'm always prompted to choose one when I open the first window. Can it be fixed? Maybe. But my other browsers just open. I don't hate Microsoft enough to spend my free time re-configuring browsers and neither do most users.

b) I have about 10,000 percent more system alerts with Netscape/Mozilla than any other browser. The problem is largely related to ad server software. Can it be fixed? I'm sure it can, but boy I sure am expected to do a lot of work to get this baby just to perform at what I consider minimal standards of browsing.

c) They default to the "classic" display theme on a standard download. Half the navigation images for that theme don't even load. Now, I don't know why anyone wouldn't want the more attractive "modern" themed appearance (it should probably be the default, no?) but let's say you do. Rather annoying to look at broken images all the time.

d) Download times, especially image rendering, are much slower on Moz-based browsers than IE and Opera on every machine I have access to, Macs and PCs alike.

e) I'm still bitter about the disaster that is Netscape 4.x ;)

Everyone hold the hate mail, please. I know many of you very passionately support Mozilla and Netscape and I know they have their merits. Just not enough for me to use them regularly over IE considering the above.

Here's the thing: The much maligned Internet Explorer still seems to be heavily used by the tech community which so happily scorns it.

This whole rant was sparked by a discussion with a new friend who does in fact use Netscape, but his comment started me thinking.... the evidence from my own site traffic would suggest that the tech community very much still uses IE no matter what its members say.

Specifically, 88.9 percent of the traffic on my site (me, the bots and AvantGo excluded) travels in the IE lane. Netscape accounts for 10 percent, Opera 1.1 percent. (The numbers are rounded -- about .1 percent is made up of other miscellaneous browsers.)

And I don't have exact percentages, but based on my referrers, messages and the types of searches which bring readers to my site, I do know that the large bulk of my traffic comes from tech and information design communities.

Does all this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not... I just thought it was interesting. I expected much higher non-IE numbers based on what I know of the crowds passing through my pages.

May 23, 2003