Excellent Alertbox by Jacob Nielsen. I thought it’s stating the obvious but it still surprises my how many marketers, designers and techies just don’t get it. This article is a very nice summary.
I don’t think so, but Yahoo! and OMD found 13 household that were willing to do just that. The results are interesting but predictable. The Internet has become an import part of peoples daily activities and they have become reliant on it. Glad I’m not the only one.
Jarret Spool published a great article on webpronews.com (never heard of that website before) about the cost of frustration where he analysis the cost of poor Usability on the Amtrak website. I’ve been using a similar approach to our reservation system but I never went as far as calculating the exact cost.
Google registered the GBrowser.com domain name recently. There are other indicators Google might be developing a web browser, as reported by to kottke.org. Great news for the people managing and producing websites. This, combined with the success of Firefox will further spark the flame for browser innovation.
Mozilla released it’s version 1.0 Preview Release this week and has seen more then 750,000 downloads in three days. News.com reports that early adopter sites such as News.com and W3schools (early adopters websites) are experiencing a dramatic decline in usage of Internet Explorer. It’s good news that the browser wars are heating up. Maybe that will bring back the innovation from the late 90’s and will accelerate the adoption of Web Standards to a point where we can build and maintain websites without having to resolve to outdated techniques or modern hacks.
Some people might put me in the Microsoft basher category after reading my last post. This is not true at all. For example, I was part of the team that selected a Microsoft Solution recently. This solution will, among other things, power our new website. But it does bother me that a year ago, Microsoft seemed to be completely disengaged in moving Internet Explorer forward in the short term. I believe in web standards and IE needs a lot of work to fully support the CSS2 specs and transparent ping support.
Microsoft displayed a certain arrogance because of their dominant position in the browser market. I assume this wasn’t intended and recently, a grass roots PR campaign is trying to fix this, in particular through a number of weblogs:
There’s also a Wiki . Smoke and mirrors? Or will we see the improvements the web community has been craving soon?
I’ve had some interesting discussions about browsers and minimum requirements. Most professionals still seem to like to limit their efforts to one browser, Internet Explorer. And preferably 5.5 and up. Betting on one browser that happens to be the dominant browser today causes a significant risk if that would change. Because of security issues, U.S. government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), issued a warning strongly suggesting that users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer should switch to another Web browser. That resulted in some very bad press recently, and a (slight) reduction in market share. This could lead to a cascading effect, resulting regular users changing their browser. And website owners who are only focused on Internet Explorer having to do major re-designs. I for one, don’t have budget for this.
I’m not a fan of Baseball, but I’m jealous of the people that are. On MLB.com, fans can watch or listen to games live, watch highlights, access stats and more. I’ve always considered sports to be perfect for the Internet, for reasons Wired.com lays out:
Being a Dutchman living in Vancouver, Canada makes watching my favorite sports difficult. It’s a Hockey, (American) Football, Basketball, Baseball, WWF and NASCAR sports culture here. I’ve come to like Hockey (there’s no escape), but getting my fix of Soccer, Tour de France and F1 is getting better all the time.
On UEFA.com, you can watch Champions League games about an hour after a game is over. I’m very pleased with the service but the design of the website makes it almost impossible to start watching a game without knowing the score. Watching a full game isn’t much fun when you already know the result. Another problem with the delay is that watching sports is very much a social experience. Even when I’m 8000KM away from my friends and family in Amsterdam, I can still have that experience by communicating with them via Instant Messenger. This is so important that I end up listening to the radio and only watch the game if my team won.
I also watch F1 races. They’re all broadcasted live on TV here. Most races are in Europe or Asia so I used to tape them as they’re on in the middle of the night here. But on F1.com, you can access live stats during the race now. This is great stuff. You can see track positions, lap times and more. This only works when watching the race live of course. The added value is so cool that I stopped taping the race and get up to watch the race on TV and computer.
I hope that big events such as the Olympics and World Cup Soccer will also find a way to make it feasible to use the Internet. These events currently rely heavily on revenue from TV broadcast rights. And the IOC and FIFA do anything to protect this revenue. During the last Olympics, it was really bad. As a Dutchman, I like speed skating (buy me a beer and I’ll explain why). During the Olympics, there are always multiple events on at the same time. Because of the strict IOC rules, I couldn’t even listen to the races on the radio because the Dutch broadcaster wasn’t allowed to do that. I don’t think many people around the world are interested in a speed skating broadcast in Dutch.
Online collaboration and communication tools are getting better all the time. And broadband is becoming mainstream so people will find a way to be able to watch sport live online. It’s easy enough these days to plug a TV signal into a computer and broadcast the TV signal online. Next time I’m visiting the homeland I’ll hook my dad up with the tool that will allow me to watch anything I like at any time. The “restrict and censor” approach isn’t going to work anymore in this day and age.
The 2010 Olympics will be held here in Vancouver. I expect that by that time any event will be available online, live, in any language, one way or the other. If the IOC and broadcasters realize the inevitability, they can turn this into a nice business. But it wouldn
The government of New Zealand has set a January 1, 2006 deadline when most government website need to meet their Web Accessibility guidelines. Most agencies expect redesigning their websites will be expensive. I believe it’s every website owners responsibility to look ahead and take accessibility issues into account. I work for a Crown corporation and one day we will face similar laws in Canada. My goal is to not wait until this happens, it’s a moral obligation to all people with a disability to create accessible interfaces.
Peter Merholz writes about a session of the IA summit by Laurie Gray. Check out his comments and her Powerpoint (2MB) presentation. The visualization of the different approaches between two audiences. I’m all inspired, this would be a great way to anlyze travel planning behaviour.