In Designing for the Web by Joshua McClurg-Genevese tells us about some of the things that make the web, the web. He takes us through many steps to achieving a successful, attractive, and useful webpage. He starts off by telling us about some of the constraints a website can have, either due to lousy technology or uneducated humans using the website. I think this McClurg-Genevese article was assigned so that us as a class could get a better understanding of how to make our blog pages more attractive to the user, from the inside out.
One observation that caught my eye was this graph (below), breaking down the current browser tends in the world, with IE standing for Internet Explorer:
What I found interesting about this chart was that it’s from 2005. Now, I know that when this article was written in 2006 it might have still been accurate, but today it would be totally off. From what I’ve noticed just by being around in 2016, everybody uses Google Chrome, a browser that came out in December of 2008, three years after this study was conducted. The research did after seeing this chart and being surprised matched my observations today, with a study showing that today Google Chrome is used as the default browser by almost 60% of internet users.
If I had to choose one thing that I took from this first article, it would be how important it is to do user research on the people who visit your site the most. There are many ways to find out who the intended audience of your site is, through surveys, interviews, focus groups, field studies, and usability testing to name a few. Even the slightest tweak or update to your site to make your user’s experience better will help you in the long run of your site.
Although I did learn a lot from this first article, the tricky tech lingo left me with some unanswered questions. What is the difference between screen resolution and image resolution? What are web-safe colors? How is a PNG different from a GIF?
First Google Images result when I searched “PNG image”
First Google Images result when I searched “GIF image”, click for movement
I guess I have some research to do!