Blog & articles

Well for one day,  according to TG Daily reporting satistics provided by Net Applications Safari is listed with a 10.91% share of the browser market on 28 February 2009.  This seems to be due to rapid uptake of the new beta version of Safari which is estimated to have been downloaded 11 million times over four days.

It is important to be careful when reviewing this type of browser statistics as there is generally some sampling bias as figures are collected from sites using their products.  However, it does highlight the importance of Safari.

Net Applications figures for the month put Safari’s market share at 7% overall which is a significant number of people even discounting the latest boost from the beta.  However, it should be noted that their figures place the market share of the mac operating system at nearly 10%.  This suggests that mac users may be more likely than microsoft users to switch from the browser packaged with the operating system to firefox or another browser.

Analysis: Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share

Browser Market Share

I recently received a letter I originally dismissed as spam.  The first line read ‘We’re currently checking all our customers’ details to make sure our records are kept up to date.’. The thing that made me question whether this was the usual run of the mill phishing letter attempting to steal my passwords and my life was that I didn’t receive it in my inbox but through my door. Now I’m not saying you can’t get phishing attempts through the post, I once received a hand written letter from the wife of an ex-president of nigeria offering to share millions.  However, generally people running these cons don’t want to have to pay postage.

The other thing that made me think that the letter may be genuine was the lack of dodgy web address designed to coax me in to supplying personal details and secret codes.  It turns out the letter was from Ocardo trying to encourage me to change my setting on there site to receive updates.  In fact, if I was willing to sign up of updates on the service they were willing to give me a £5 shopping vouchure.  However, in order to drive me to the site they had decided to present the letter as encouraging their customers to update there details.  This not only feels like a dishonest way to communicate with your customers it lends credibility to phishing emails.

Today’s cartoon on dilbert highlights an issue with any user research, it all depends who you ask. When preparing to conduct any sort of user research you should spend time considering how you will recruit users, how your choice of selection methods may bias the sample and what criteria you should use. It is important that the sample should reflect your target audience since opinions and how users interact can differ greatly between groups. The location, time and method of sampling can greatly affect the type of users you end up with.

Some sampling bias is likely with any user research since they will only include people willing to take part in research (self selection). Incentives can be used to encourage participation, however it is important to select the correct incentive since it will make it more likely that you recruit those that find the incentive of value. A degree of sampling bias is not necessarily a problem as long steps are taken to ensure the sample is representative of the target audience and the sampling method is considered at the time of analysis.

Before implementing the findings of research it is important to evaluate them against the needs of the wider target audience and the business, whether changes will impact other parts of the site and whether the respondents are your key audience. No research should be taken at face value blindly implementing users opinions. User research is an important tool informing us of our audiences needs, opinions and behaviour but we need to look at it critically and in the context in which it was conducted.

Pownce the micro blogging community site that allows you to send messages, links and files to your friends will shut down on 15 December 2008.  The site, created by among others Kevin Rose the man that brought you digg, has been bought by six apart the company behind blogging software such as moveable type and typepad.

The decision to simply close the site rather than attempt to integrate the pownce community into their own site seems a little odd since community sites rely on their ability to retain and build users. Tools have been provided allowing the users to move their content to Vox, six aparts blogging community, however, I imagine many users will feel rejected by six apart and move to another platform. One can only imagine that unnamed factors made the cost of maintaining both communities or integrating them prohibitive.

A recent article on the Specyboy blog provides a summary of some of the most useful firefox plugins for web designers.  These include the excellent web developer extension which I have used for several years.  A lot of the other plugins perform tasks already covered by the web developer plugin, however there is the odd interesting one.  These include abduction a screen capture tool and  extended status bar which provides information on load speed.  The full list can be seen here, 27 Indispensable Web Design and Development Firefox Extensions.