So, they support Windows, OS X, the iPhone and the iPad. They cover four major browsers, but apparently using an up-to-date version of one of those browsers is not supported.
Web Development
The Usability of the Link Icon
Peter Steen Høgenhaug has posted the results of a usability test focused “aimed at exploring how little documentation you could leave in a CMS, and still have even the most non-savvy person use it with no issues”. This lead him to discover how few people make the connection between an icon of two links in a chain with the act of creating a hyperlink to another page. It’s a quick read and a fascinating study of the cognitive association, or lack thereof when trying to extend real world imagery to represent online actions.
It would be interesting to see a study focused on users who are familiar with content management systems, to see if they find this to be an issue. Without a great replacement, we may need to rely on discovery and learning for this association.
This reminds me a lot of my previous post . So, posing the same question as we did there – what would be a good replacement? I haven’t been able to come up with a great iconic substitution and am leaning ever so slightly, toward simply using the word Link. I’m sure there’s something better though.
What do you think, is it worth changing? If so, what should it be?
Visualizing the Debt Crisis: Layers of Passion and Opinion
I love how the New York Times uses user-generated content with real-time(ish) visualization for this piece title The Debt Crisis: What Should Congress Do?
The spread of opinion and the level of passion for each point is instantly visible at both an individual and aggregate level. The requirement that each submissions must also include a comment adds further depth and understanding.
Fixed-Width vs. Responsive, Connect Four vs. Twister
Fixed-width design isn’t going away, because it’s easy. It’s like playing the game Connect Four versus playing Twister. One is simple and straightforward, the other multivariate, so much so that you can’t really formulate a one-size-fits-all strategy. Which isn’t to say people shouldn’t endeavor to do responsive sites, just that they can’t expect the heavy lifting to be done for them.
Nathan Smith on Google Buzz for .Net Magazine’s next “Big Question”
Relative Paths
If you want to guarantee that a link to an external asset (CSS, JavaScript, images etc.) will work, use a protocol-independent absolute path, which leaves out the http:
or https:
portion of the URL. For example:
<img src="//domain.com/img/logo.png"/>
The browser will then make the determination as to whether it should call the asset using SSL (https:
) or not (http:
).
Data Will Set You Straight
We are very proud of our empirical focus, because it makes us humble – we realize that most of the time, we don’t know up-front what customers want. The feedback from testing quickly sets us straight, and helps make sure that our efforts are really focused at optimizing the things that make a difference in the customer experience
Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer, Netflix
The rest of the response to the question “What types of things does Netflix A/B test aside from member sign-up?” is well worth the quick read.