Hi

I can’t make a recommendation on which browsers you should or shouldn’t support, but I have some thoughts on how you can go about deciding.

Questions the client originally brought up:

What percentage of people are on the browser?
This is a good question, but I think the number of actual people on this browser for a given time frame will be the more useful metric. Stick with me and I think you’ll see why.

Is the browser gaining tracking or losing?
Great question, this is useful for forecasting the future.

Coding implications to support the browser?
Exactly! And more explicitly, short term and long term cost (in actual dollars) for supporting a given browser. This is best to calculate in the sense that you commit to support a core set (a set that is obvious and a no brainer to support), you then calculate the extra dev hours to support and test each additional browser outside of that core set.

The business case

What you want to do is make a business case out of this. So there are a few more questions you have to ask and you’ll probably need to work with marketing and your IT team to get these answered. You guys are in e-commerce, so this stuff is important to due your due diligence.

What is the financial value of a customer coming to the site? Example with made up data: potential sell is $200 of profit per customer, average of 4% of customers who visit the site buy something, average visitor generates $8.

You then take that value of the average visitor and multiple that by the number of people for a given browser over the course of the year or month. You then have a rough projection of the value to the business for supporting a given browser.

Continuing on that logic with example data, say IE6 has an average of 94 visitors a month. Each visitor is worth $8 to you, so supporting IE6 is worth $752 a month to the organization in revenue. Take that number and subtract the extra development cost to support that browser and you’ll either have a positive or negative number. That number, in addition to your forecast of whether that number will go up or down over time will allow you to make a decision on what to support.

Note: aside from the strict business case, you’ll want to consider other special case factors (like if your boss is on a given platform).

It gets more complicated in your situation, because you then have to ask yourself if you want to support the same platform set across all countries so you have a consistent code base for efficiencies or you may have separate code base’s for each country/region that allow you to tailor your browser selection according to region. From a management perspective, it seems simpler to have a single code base and a single list of browsers to support, but that’s something for you guys to think about.

This mix of browsers and screen resolutions, gives you your giant list of platform combinations. Note: make sure you identify what platform combos are tablets like the iPad (which is probably your Safari browser with 1024×768 platform combo).

Anyways, I hope this helps!
Cheers,
Derrek

Essay-sites generally have these characteristics

• They currently call themselves blogs, but should position themselves as essay-sites.
• They are written by professionals from a variety of industries.
• The writing is sporadic. They don’t publish on a regular basis and sometimes they won’t publish anything for large stretches of time (months or even years).
• They don’t have regular readers.
• They are referenced for their high quality content. Usually only a specific essay (blog post) is referenced.
• They often act as a supplement to the modern day professional resume.

Why essay-sites instead of blogs

I struggled with my own blog for a long time. I was in this half-way place. I was trying to make it something that was unattainable for me, because that’s what I thought I had to do.

The idea of current, regularly updated content is inherent in the original concept of a blog. I knew I had something to say and I naturally gravitated to the blog structure and concept. So, that’s how I got started. In the beginning, the first couple of weeks, it was fine. I averaged a post a week. Not bad. However, that quickly changed as I became engrossed in day to day life and found little time for regular updates. It’s a nice thought, but it’s not going to happen for me.

To compensate for my lack of time to create my own unique content I started doing what a lot of people do on blogs. I began curating other people’s interesting content and posting it on my blog as filler. The stuff in between my actual unique content. There are already very popular sites that due this much better than I ever could. Further, new sites like LinkedIn Today are using social media algorithms to automate this. This is a much better tactic for providing curating services to the community than an individual like myself trying to hand curate. More importantly, when I was doing this, I wasn’t adding any original content to the web. I was just re-hashing content.

So, as I began to realize what I was actually doing I re-evaluated my approach. I faced up to the facts that the time I could devote to writing useful content was sporadic and that wasn’t going to change. Further, the content I was writing remained of value for a prolonged period of time and is useful on an educational level. At it’s best, it is referenced and shared across the web.

So, I stripped out all my blog posts that were not original content. I stopped calling this a blog and started positioning it as a set of essays that have useful information in them. It’s helping me focus my efforts on something that provides value. Overtime, I plan on adding useful features to make the essays easy to share.

I think this situation holds true for a lot of people. For folks like me, I say we should embrace this, rather than try to fight it. The concept of a blog does not properly describe the nature of our content or the frequency of it. Thus, I am positioning my site as a collection of essays and I am proposing that many current blogs would be better off doing the same.

I think that there is a difference between something being easy to use, because it feels natural vs something that is easy to use, because we’ve learned how it’s suppose to work through time and repetition. Something can be easy because it is natural, we learn it quickly, almost without mental effort. Or something can be easy, because we’ve learned a particular behavior (design pattern). Both are learned, but one has a steeper, longer learning curve than the other.

In regards to web design, things that are easy to use are either something we’ve learned over time and it’s only easy to use, because we’ve learned a complex set of information (like how to use a computer), or it’s easy to use because it has parallels with the physical world, and thus, builds off of existing knowledge.

Natural

Take a real physical button. Like the keys you find on a piano. If you put a 3 year old kid in front of a piano, pretty quickly he’s going to figure out that if you push those buttons (keys) sound is going to come out. They look like something you should push on. Like they’re asking you to do it.

Another example is the wheel. It’s something we intuitively understand how to use. Push something that has wheels on it and it will roll. It’s easy, because it’s familiar.

Learned

On the other hand, there are things that are easy, because we’ve learned them over time and repetition. Like a link on a web page. When we see text underlined we know we can click it. There is actually a whole variety of steps we’ve learned to perform this seemingly simplistic task. We learned how to navigate the pointer on our screen. We learned that our mouse or trackpad will allow us to navigate the pointer  on our screen. We’ve learned to place that pointer on something we want to click on, and finally, we’ve learned that if we click on text that is underlined, it will load a new web page. This isn’t something we know because it’s natural, we know it because we took the time to learn it. For some of us, this was actually a challenge to get our heads around the first time we did it.

It’s easy now, because we’ve learned it over time with lots of repetition. We’ve seen it done over and over and over. This underlining of text is called a design pattern, because the underlined text (design) is used over and over (the pattern) to indicate a link on a website.

Learning a new design

When we encounter a new design, some are easier to learn than others. I think it depends on how close the design is from other things we’ve already learned in both the physical and virtual world. The further away a design solution is from something we’ve seen before the harder it is to understand it’s meaning. The closer a design solution is to something we’ve seen before, the easier it is to understand.

For something to be “closer”, it must resemble something we’ve seen before and the design message must also be similar to what is being referenced. The two designs that related to each other (one, being the one we’ve seen before and two being the new one we’ve just encountered), must have an accurate connection. If the design is similar, but the intended message is completely different, it’ll only confuse us.

Using design patterns

When using existing design patterns, we should consider how well known that design pattern is and how easy it is for someone who is unfamiliar with it to learn it.

This applies to many aspects of design. This can be very useful and important knowledge in usability design. When designing an interface, sometimes you want to use a simple icon without any text to represent something. It can be a way to clean up and simplify the interface. If what you want to repesent with an icon has a common and well understood visual that goes with it, you’re in luck. You can design an icon to match the visual and people will understand the meaning pretty easily.

People will only understand your icon if they’ve seen it used in the same way to represent the same thing over and over.

One well understood icon is the magnifying glass. It’s always used for search .

Everyone knows that this icon stands for searching. But we only know this because we’ve learned this through time and repetition. There is nothing about a real physical magnifying glass that lets you know it means search. A real physical magnifying makes things larger so they are easier to see (a related, but different meaning from search), but because we’ve seen it used for search so often and so consistently we know that it stands for search in the context of a website. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a smart icon to represent search.

Designing something new, there is no pattern, yet.

What becomes challenging is when you need to design an icon for something that is not universally understood. Say you have a new feature in a piece of software or you want an icon to represent an entire section of your website. Well, nobody knows what this icon means. No matter how talented and how hard a designer tries he/she isn’t going to be able to design an icon that everyone will know stands for whatever your designing for. The only way people will understand it is through time and repetition.

You can help your icon by putting text next to it to help give it additional meaning. This will help guide people in associating the meaning of the word to the meaning of the icon. Then, through time and repetition people will start to intuitively know what that icon stands for.

I’ve picked up a few best practices over the years that, generally speaking, raise brand awareness and improve click through rates. Here are a few:

• Make your logo bigger: really, it’s surprising how many banner ads are out there where you have no idea who the offer is from, because the logo doesn’t exist or it’s tiny. Make it bigger.
• Keep your CTA on the banner at all times or as long as possible. People scan through websites and they rarely stop to watch a banner for 10–15 seconds. They scan you’re banner. Every frame counts. Make it scannable. You don’t have to be that flashy, you just have to make it scannable and noticeable.
• Have something worth saying. I know, you’ve heard the whole content is king argument before, but it still holds true with banner ads. People scan your banner and if you have something interesting (or entertaining) on your banner, they’ll engage with it.

These maxims don’t always hold true, but most of the time they do. Something to keep in mind the next time you’re working on a banner campaign.

It’s all about the sale

I couldn’t agree more with the statement: It’s the Sales that matter, but why do we have to look at this as interruption vs engagement? While I agree with most of the individual points in this article I think this a false argument. I don’t think we should be looking at this as Interruption vs Engagement. We need to do both and we don’t have to choose one or the other.

Yes, it’s about the sales, that’s why we’re in this business. Without the sale, we can all go home.

Engagement is about the sale or to use the other buzz word, social media is about the sale. Any business engaging in social media should be focused on how that increases sales. Otherwise, why are you wasting your time in that space?

Advertising is and was a conversation

The beauty of social media is that it gives us advertisers a way to talk to our customers directly. It’s another venue for our message.

Having a conversation with our customers brings us closer to the traditional sell process then ever before (this is a good thing). It brings us closer to the salesman talking to a customer to explain the glories of the product he/she is selling. It’s more personal. It’s more human.

Traditional advertising via interruption. Lovely. Yes please. And like you said, especially if I’m waiting in line somewhere bored. I’d love an interesting ad to read.

Social media as advertising? Yes please. As a customer I’m talking on Facebook, Twitter, I’m reading blogs. Talk to me. Sell me something I want. After all, I took the initiative to follow your company on Twitter and like your page on Facebook, I’m obviously interested.

As a customer I’m talking about you (your company and products) on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. You’ve a right to talk back and engage in the conversation. You’ve the right to persuade me one way or another. In fact, as a customer, I appreciate that you show enough effort to care.

As an advertiser I think we need to embrace all the tools available to us to sell our products to our customers in a cost efficient way. I truly believe both traditional and new media forms of advertising are effective.

This is something I think about a lot. Everyone where I work is smart, talented and hard working.

We’re not a huge company, but we’re not so small that one person can make all the decisions for the company. There are just too many decisions made everyday. Some small and some large. We have to find ways to allow everyone in the company to make decisions intelligently.

I’d say we tackle this with some basic core principles that seem to work for us. Although, my colleagues might tell you something different. Anyways, here goes:

1. The least experienced and knowledgeable team members are given constant exposure to the thinking behind decisions made by the more experienced and knowledgeable individuals in the company. This helps everyone to learn why a decision is made and in turn arms everyone with the knowledge they need to make future decisions. There isn’t much back-door decision making going on. It’s very transparent.
2. We have strong company values and philosophies that guide us. We do not have tons of specific rules and policies. Stick to the company philosophies and values and you’ll be fine making decisions.
3. We let people make gradual decisions. What I mean is that they start off making their own decisions on smaller things that will have a smaller impact on the business (less risk). If they make a mistake they’re educated on why, but they’re not chastised or punished for it in any way. As they gain more experience they’re given more leeway to make bigger decisions. We always try to keep people just slightly out of their comfort zone so they can grow.

I’d be very interested in a book on this subject. Although we’re a relatively successful small business, there is always more to learn and making great decisions is rarely easy. Pixar makes a wonderful case study for us, because they’re in a similar line of work as we are (advertising and animated films have a lot in common).

Supporters of this thinking say that if you want something fast and great quality they have to charge you more. In saying that they’re also saying that if you want a project to take forever, be great quality then they’ll make it really cheap.

This is foolish and bad business. First of all, if I’m working on a project with a client and they want it to take a long time, it’s going to cost a lot more. It’s going to take more time and effort than if it was going to be a short and quick project. A project with long deadlines gives the client more opportunity to provide feedback and constant revisions and sometimes to ill effect (sometimes to good effect, too).

The downsides of a long deadline.

Long deadlines are torture for designers. They’re so far away and so hard to grasp that it makes it difficult to focus on what you need to do today. You end up dragging your feet and spinning your wheels. You lack focus and proper parameters. You second guess your decisions and constantly rethink things over and over again. Achieving little to nothing until the last few days before your deadline. And then, when time is almost up, you get things done.

The benefits of a short deadline.

In my experience, designers do their best work and they do it most efficiently when they have short deadlines (1-3) days and are able to focus on a single project.

I’ve never seen anything to get people to focus like a short deadline. Designers, copywriters, developers, art directors, creative directors, brand managers, CMOs, anybody. People focus under pressure and get things done. You’ve got a challenge in front of you, you’ve got the parameters of a short schedule to craft your solution and you don’t have time to constantly second guess yourself.

There is something to be said for taking the time to think things through to get really good quality, but in my experience, the best designs and the best ideas come very early on in a project. Your ideas are a little more raw, a little more real and they’re not diluted by over analyzing and second guessing yourself.

What about refinement? Yes, that takes time and a few rounds of revisions. But it doesn’t take months and years to do. It takes days and weeks.

Cheap is bad for everyone.

I don’t care what your schedule or budget is, cheap projects are not good for anybody.

The agency feels like they’re getting screwed. They don’t put the effort into it that they would on other projects. It doesn’t matter if they have 3 days or 3 years to get a project done. The work is going to suck because they’re not going to care about your project and you’re going to get poor quality work.

Expensive (unrealistically overpriced) projects are not good for anybody either. The client feels like they’re getting screwed. They become overly demanding on the project and start requesting things outside of the realm of their expertise. They paid their agency too much and now they expect the moon to be delivered to them. The agency will never be able to live up to this expectation. The work might turn out okay, but the relationship will be ruined and you won’t be getting another project.

Make it a fair price.

Fairly priced projects are good for everybody. The client feels like they’re getting a good deal. The agency feels like they’re getting a good deal. Everybody involved cares about the project, the relationship and about completing it in a timely fashion. Decisions are more likely to be made decisively and real progress can be made. The project ends and if everybody knows what they’re doing the quality can be superb. The relationship is in good standing and everybody ends up wanting more (another project). The agency gets repeat business and the client has a vendor they can rely on at a fair price.

If somebody tells you can pick 2 of the 3 you’re in the wrong place. Reject the premise. You don’t want all 3 and they don’t either.

If you want top quality design, fast and at a fair price, contact me. I work at Creative B’stro. We’re an advertising agency in the San Francisco Bay Area. We do great work, fast and at a fair price.

I recently came across this crime-city-light-map of San Francisco. The lights you see above, are not the lights of San Francisco. Each light represents crime data. The more and  brighter the lights are, the more crime there is. For once, good is represented by darkness, and light is represented by evil. I think it’s actually a very deceiving map due to the way the data is visualized. Since the good is represented by darkness, there ends up being a lot of black on the map. But, we typically associate good with light and dark with evil. So, it’s playing a trick on our minds. When I first saw this map, I thought wow! There is a lot more crime in San Francisco than I realized. Looks like a pretty dangerous place.

But if you switch it. If you make the crime black and the good light (white) then it doesn’t feel so bad. Feels fairly safe. The impression you get from the map below is completely different even though it’s showing the same data, just in a different way. Now we see lots of white (good) and just a touch of bad (black and blue) throughout the map. I’d definitely rather live in the city below rather than the one above.

I also found some crime-elevation-maps that I thought were really cool (see below). The mountains you see are not the actual mountains and hills of the city. They’re hills that represent the amount of crime in the city. These were created by Doug McCune, check out his blog post. He also created the first dark city light map you see above. I created the second one by inverting his image.

These maps are great, because they take data that would be incomprehensible to most of us, and become instantly understandable. A quick glance at these maps and you can easily tell what areas of the city have the most crime and which areas don’t. I’d be interested in inverting these maps too (I lack the technical skill to do so). What would they look like if the crime areas were represented by giant craters/holes in the city? Would they give you a different impression of the city?

The San Francisco Chronicle also wrote a short article on these maps.

I’ve been recently traveling to a lot of different places within the United States. I was in Boston, Massachusetts; New York, New York; Conway, Arkansas and San Francisco, California. Most of the cities mentioned here are large cities with the exception of Conway where I grew up. In the large cities the zoning is really compact. I assume from economic pressures.

In most places in the large cities you have shops intermingled with residential areas. Everything is close together and you can do most everything you need just by walking around. In fact, you’re often forced to walk around. You couldn’t drive everywhere if you wanted to. There’s no parking available.

In Conway the experience is a bit different. It’s a typical small town in America. It has a population a little over 50,000. It has a couple of Walmarts, plenty of strip malls, three universities and all the chain stores and restaurants you could ever want.

Not to insult the local population of Conway, but I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the health of the people who live there. In the larger cities most people look to be in pretty good shape. Not everyone is a track athlete or anything like that, but on the whole people seem to be pretty healthy. In Conway the picture is a little different. Many people seem to be a little on the larger side.

I don’t think that people who live in the larger cities are better people. I don’t think they’re smarter, or have stronger will power or anything like that. I think it’s a result of the local zoning laws.

In Conway, everything is spread out. It’s so spread out you are almost forced to drive every where you go. It’s hard to find sidewalks even if you want to walk. I recently tried to walk to the local grocery store that wasn’t far from my dad’s house. We had sidewalks about two thirds of the time and the rest of the time we had to either walk in the street with cars honking their horns at us or walk in people’s yards (it had been recently raining, so that was a muddy option). It was a rather discouraging experience. I kind of wish we had just drove to the grocery store even though it wasn’t far and we were not carrying very much.

These small to medium size towns don’t need to be this way. Somebody intentionally created laws that promoted this type of development. Where everything is spread out, no sidewalks and you’re forced to drive (and thus rarely get the chance to walk and get exercise throughout your day).

Interestingly enough, this might all be changing. At least in certain parts of Conway. Thankfully there are some local business men who are putting in serious sums of money into revitalizing the previously dead downtown area. This is great because it’s one of the few areas of the city that is more densely zoned to promote walking. Plus, they’re pushing for a change in the zoning laws to allow for residential housing (apartments) to be mixed in with the commercial areas.

People who live in these more densely zoned areas will be more prone to walk because it’ll be easier to walk than to drive! This type of zoning also had advantages that are particularly useful to students and the elderly. Cash strapped students can save themselves the expense of needing a car. The elderly will have access to everything they need without having to use a car. This helps keep them active and independent.

There are downsides to more densely zoned areas. Noise pollution is definitely one of them. It’s one I’m struggling with right now. My downstairs neighbors like to throw late night parties on Thursdays. That doesn’t work out very well because I have work on Friday morning. We’re working with them and our landlord to educate them on the importance of being respectful with the noise level. They’re getting better about it, but it’s a constant struggle.

If you live in an area with zoning laws that cause everything to be really spread out, maybe you might want to consider talking to your local politicians and request more compact zoning laws. If you live in the suburbs, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to walk out your door and run into a handful of local restaurants within a 15 minute walk? At least from an environmental standpoint, it’d beat driving 40 miles to the big city to find a restaurant.

Then again, maybe this is just a big city mentality trying to force it’s mindset on a small town that is perfectly content just the way it is.