With the growing number of Apple fans out there one would think that Safari is quickly gaining ground, but the fact of the matter is that IE6 is still the number one browser out there. Here are the latest browser stats from w3counter as of October 10,2007.

Screen resolution is another hot debate. Since more and more people have larger monitors shouldn’t we be increasing the width of our designs? Turns out that the most used screen resolution worldwide is 1024×768 but did you know that only 50% of users maximize their screen? Before you start making designs that are 1000px wide, you might want to keep that number in mind. Here are the stats for screen resolution.

There are many other stats you should look at before designing. The location of your audience, are they using broadband, do they consist of a mostly technological crowd? If so, these should also be considered before you start.

The Toronto Film Festival which ended a few weeks ago, has a much more useful website. The link to the blogs is not part of the main navigation bar, but it was easy enough to find on the home page. Once at the right spot it was explained that the blogs consist of 7 blogs. I’m not sure why these simply aren’t categories, but at least it’s easy enough to go through the entries and read about the many films.

In the end I’ve decided to use Facebook to write my comments. I’m not sure many people will read them, but until the VIFF re-designs their website, I think that’s the best I can do.

Here are some highlights:

• Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
• Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
• I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
• Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
• Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.

A colleague of mine working for a biopharma company needed to find a contractor capable of handling their clinical trials. These types of studies cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thus can’t just simply be handed out to companies without doing appropriate research. Of course the most logical starting point is a search on the Net.

The first company had all the right information but there was nothing about their team or who the main researchers were. Was this a one person shop or a company full of technical experts? Next…

The second company located in Oxford, had staff pictures, but some of them were baby pictures. One guy didn’t even bother to comb his hair while one woman looked like a porn star! Even though this company may have thought that their tongue-in-cheek approach was funny, my colleague quickly dismissed them as freaks and moved onto the next Google listing.

Finally another failed attempt to find a suitable company resulted in a website that was packed full of information but the only way to get in contact with them was through a painstaking contact form. Not only are contact forms annoying to fill out and leave you waiting for an answer but most people don’t want to do business with companies who won’t reveal where they are located.

When creating your website it’s important to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. People don’t have time to read all of your “marketing speak”, go though your flash intros and fill out contact forms. Skip the bells and whistles, and get on giving your visitors what they need.

Do you like jam? Could you give a detailed explanation of why you like one particular jam over another? As part of a study, a group of people were asked to sample five strawberry jams. These jams had been chosen from a list of 45 jams that had been ranked by experts for the Consumer Reports magazine. The jams used included the highest ranked (1st), 11th, 24th, 32nd, and second-to-last ranked (44th).

“Left to their own devices, control subjects formed preferences for strawberry jams that corresponded well to the ratings of trained sensory experts,” study authors, Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler, wrote. “Subjects asked to think about why they liked or disliked the jams brought to mind reasons that did not correspond very well with the experts’ ratings.”

Basically, the more people were asked to explain their choices, the worse their choices became. “By making people think about jams, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in his excellent book Blink.

In another study on jams, behavioral scientist, Sheena Iyengar, found that the more choices people were given, the less choice they made. The study involved setting up a taste-test booth on two consecutive Saturdays in a grocery store. On the first day, six jams were placed for tasting, on the next Saturday, 24 were placed.

While the greater selection of jams attracted more people to the booth, the smaller selection of jams resulted in significantly more sales. In fact, 30 percent of those exposed to the smaller jam selection bought, while only 3 percent bought from the larger selection.

There are two key lessons to be learnt from these studies:

» We can’t necessarily find out what people want by asking themd directly. We therefore need to do a lot of observation.
» Simply giving people lots and lots of choice is not necessarily the right approach.

“In subsequent studies we found that people are actually less satisfied with the choices they make if selected from a larger set of options,” Sheena Iyengar writes. “It is not simply that thinking leads to decisions we may later regret,” Malcolm Gladwell states. “It also appears that thinking too much can lead to choices that by an objective standard can be called bad or wrong.”

Choosing jam is something you tend to do quickly and without much conscious thought. You are in unconscious thinking mode. This is a typical type of behaviour on the Web where things tend to be done very quickly.

Traditional types of research such as focus groups and surveys will rarely work well in understanding web behavior. In fact, they are more likely to deliver misleading than accurate information.

That’s why disciplines such as usability are so crucial today. Usability is about observing human behaviour. Successful web managers must become skilled observers of how their customers use their websites. Know your customers better than they know themselves. There is no other skill remotely as important to the web manager as this.