Simon Griffiths Blog

Okay so I know that there is quite a bit of software that will allow you to do user testing a lot cheaper these days than in a studio, but I hadn’t come across http://www.usertesting.com before. I used them today for the first time and they were quick, taking a day to have 5 tests done with video and written reports.

The reports I got were excellent, backing up the problems I know one of my sites had. The reviewers were good and explained their problems well. Only problem was probably that they seemed to be quite experienced internet users in some case, even though I had asked for moderate or beginners users.

Overall I would really recommend anyone do this as it only costs about $25 for a test. A bargain for the info you get.

SDL Tridion have just announced the results of a survey to see what annoys website users. No surprises here: -

• Pop-up windows
• Long intros you can’t get out of
• Losing your info
• Downloading new applications (what, their IT departments let them!)
• Asking for personal info

No surprises here, but a good reminder.

For all of you who have been producing video in Animoto, they have just announced a commercial/business license for $249. A bargain I think! See http://business.animoto.com/learnmore.html for details.

Essentially though you get as many DVD quality videos as you want, you can resell if you are in that business, and branding is reduced to a small powered by Animoto.

In the last few weeks there has been many articles about Yahoo, that they are unfocused, and should have sold to Microsoft, but in one area they are the leaders and are killing Google. Don’t get me wrong here, I love Googles stuff in general but on the mobile phone, they suck!

First let me explain why this is a big deal. There is a growing tendency for people to access the web via their mobile and all the big players in the search market want a slice of the action. Why is this of interest to them? Simply because of the numbers involved. There are about 850 million PC’s out there at the moment where search engines can make their money, but 2.7 billion mobile phones. That is more than 3 times the number of phones than PC’s.

Think about it in terms of market share, at the moment Google has 60% of the PC market say, but if you add mobiles into the mix, that would be just a 14% share of the total available market. If someone moves into that mobile space, Google could be sidelined!

Okay, so having said that, where are they going to make their money? Ads are the obvious answer, and to a large extent an ad served to a mobile is even more compelling than those served on a PC search. The advantage of mobile is that they know where you are, so can send you ads that may not relate to the search, but more to your location? Maybe you can resist that coffee now, but could you if you were given 20% discount from the place you are just passing?

So what do Yahoo do so write that Google do wrong? They look at intent rather than just content.

If you do a search on Google mobile, you will be returned almost exactly the same results as you will be on their desktop browser. If you look at Yahoo though you get their top 3 normal web links, and their top 3 mobile web links. You can chose to navigate to more normal or more mobile links from there.

At this point you can see there is a fundamental difference between the two approaches. My guess is that Google is expecting that you would use an iPhone or similar which has full browsing capabilities, however this is missing the point. If you are out on the road somewhere, navigating with one hand you need content and design to suit that requirement.

As an example I live in Brisbane Australia and often travel into the city by train. If I search on Google for Brisbane Train Times using my Sony K800i, or my iPod Touch I get a list of full websites that often to be honest don’t give me what I want, train times quickly and in a form factor convenient form. However go to Yahoo and do the same and you get the local council version, and a mobile specific train times program, which gives me just what I want. This shows that Yahoo is looking at the intent of mobile browsing, and is inherently more usable.

On the iPod Touch I can obviously navigate full website with not too much effort, but the different is still astonishing. Try looking at http://www.qr.com.au and http://www.tad.tw and you can see for yourself.

The end result is that on my mobile I use Yahoo, and on my Mac I use Google. If this were to replicate through the mobile space with the positions of Yahoo and Google reversed on the different platforms, where would things sit? Google would end up with 29.6% of the market, and Yahoo with 50.4%*. Even if only half of the people used the mobile web Yahoo would still overtake Google in the total search market.

In short, Yahoo was right to hold off on Microsoft. If they can maintain their focus on the mobile market, in 2 or 3 years we could all be buying their stock.

* Figures are based on 60% of the 850 million PC using Google, and 20% using Yahoo. One the mobile 60% using Yahoo and 20% using Google.

Over the last few months I have been testing a web enquiry system to see if it can be improved. At the moment the system is a simple page that opens in a new window that you have to complete with contact details and what you want.

After testing some relatively simple changes you can see huge improvement in the completion rate of the form and the visit to enquiry ratio for the page.

I thought I would post this as a way to illustrate that it content is king, usability is president. A few simple changes can generate a huge increase in revenue!

The report can be found in Google Docs form here.

Animoto have just updated their app to allow you to download a high RES mpeg4 and ISO (DVD) file. It costs $5 but is well worth it.

Resolution is doubled so will play well on a monitor and even scales to plasma or LCD screens.

We are using it to produce slick video which we play on digital photo frames in our office reception areas.

Only grumble is they still add the animoto logo and google checkout or paypal accounts are difficult in corporate environments.

Discovered Animoto a while back for creating quick, cool video for presentations, the web etc.

This is a really great tool. All you need to do is upload photos, or select them directly from your flickr account, select some music, or upload your own, and it does the rest.

The amazing bit is that this is a TV like production. None of those static images or simple Ken Burns effects, this produces something that would look the part on the TV!

Have a look at the below for an example.

B&R Enclosures

I have recently completed some tests to see whether a site that our sister company manages has a latency issue and is suffering from being hosted in Europe, rather than here is Australia.

I have to say that when I initially looked at the tests I did think that there would be some effect, having seen delays in the download of some files over the past year or so, however I was not really prepared for the effect that I actually saw.

Firstly to do the test I used Firefox with the web developer toolbar, Firebug installed. Web developer toolbar allows me to switch off caching, so that I could see files as they would be if they were coming to a new user. Firebug includes a “Net” feature that actually let you track when the browser made a request and when it was returned. It also looks at the total time it takes to complete the page.

So the test simply involved setting up a rough duplicate of the home page, hosting that locally, then navigating to both with cache turned off and checking the response time. Note that some of the local files did give errors (which actually resulted in a larger download), these were spacers etc I couldn’t find in the files.

The results….the time to load the page reduced from a massive 36.51 seconds for 300kB, to 14.7 seconds for 350kB when hosted in Australia.

I should also mention that I tested the European hosted page on a high speed connection, and got exactly the same speed. This would seem to indicate that speed on that site is latency limited. My feeling is that this 14.7 seconds for the Australian hosted site is bandwidth dependant (my work struggles at times). I will check this out further and update the posting.

The conclusion: It may seem reasonable to have a large corporate site hosted in a single location worldwide, where content can be tightly controlled. However judging by our tests, the customers user experience will be severely degraded to a point that the site may become unusable.

My advice would be host locally, or if you have to host overseas, check your speeds carefully to ensure you will have returning visitors.

Went to Adobe Air Camp in Brisbane today. This was interesting but I am concerned with the security of the system.

What I had hoped for was a very much sandboxed system that allowed little or no interactivity with the hosting computer. This may sound limiting, but lets face it, as soon as you start allowing calls to the host you run the risk of being in the same boat as ActiveX in IE. It was worrying when they were warning that you could do bad things with it if you felt so inclined!

Having said that it does offer some interesting functionality. I will be interested to see how it goes against Google Gears to be honest, but they are giving it a good go. In particular there seems to be quite a push into the mobile space, which will be interesting. At the moment I can’t see what the applications would possibly be that would require air rather than a direct connection, but you never know. Again it will probably be up against Android and the new ability of Opera to save pages if you so require.

Will I use it? Possibly, but probably a better question would be would I feel safe downloading Air apps and the unfortunate answer to that is no.

To the web design purists, this is a simple question. I no case should you open up a new window, because it breaks the back button functionality and may disorientate your viewers. However in my tests I have come up with a few rules that on our b2b business site ensure that our customers have the experience they want.

My first rule is with pdfs. Most pdf’s on most commercial sites are brochures or white papers that tend to be saved or printed for later consumption. If this is the case then open these up in a new window. That way it seems that our customers actually get less disoriented, and they can decide what to do with the pdf later. Personally I think that there are a few reasons this works. The first is mentioned above, the second is that pdf’s open up in a plug in that doesn’t have the traditional look of a web page and in fact has it’s own menu bar in most browsers. The last reason is that pdf’s aren’t web pages. Usually the only navigation open to you is the back button. So in that way it is easy to get disoriented if it is not isolated.

My second rule is a simple one, and to a large extent it is being superseded with newer technologies, but if you are not using ajax, and want to add in supplementary information, but still allow the main page to be viewed I would recommend a new window or a …wait for it…pop-up window. I know, I know, no one likes pop-ups, but is that really the case. If I ask for more information and it happens to be in a pop-up, I really don’t mind, and that has proven to be the case with our customers too.