PushON Ltd » web usability

Is it time to bury Internet Explorer (IE7) for good?

Ali Ashik — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:52:33 +0000

We’ve all been there. For the past couple of years it’s been a nightmare for us developers to spend hours either changing our CSS or HTML mark-up just so Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) can render our webpages correctly. Since the launch of IE7 back in 2006, web technologies and web standards have changed significantly. Whenever I develop websites for clients, I usually don’t have any problems in regards to testing it cross browser, 98% of the time my websites work seamlessly on pretty much all the modern browsers until I’m asked to test it on IE7.

It is understood that most developers (including myself) still optimise websites for IE7, simply because there happens to be a small minority of users who still use that browser. Latest stats as of February 2013 show that usage of IE7 has dropped to less than 4% globally. The question we need to ask is, is it still worth putting in the effort to optimise websites for IE7 for this minority of users?

Based on my previous experience, it takes an enormous amount of time to make a website or web application optimised for IE7. Due to these problems, and the very small percentage of people who even use the browser, it doesn’t make it worthwhile as far as time, effort and money is concerned. Yes, it would be nice to have a website that is compatible with all browsers, but what are the chances of your visitors (target audience) accessing your website using IE7?

Why should we stop optimising for IE7?

Big name websites such as Google and Facebook officially announced last year that they no longer support older browsers like IE7 because they don’t have the capabilities to handle today’s modern web browsing needs. Google has urged people to update their browsers for a better and safer browsing experience. Facebook’s timeline has been completely phased out from IE7. When users visit their Facebook profile page they won’t see the timeline, but instead will be presented with the old profile page.

Some ecommerce websites have even started charging an ‘IE7 tax’. Australian retailer www.kogan.com was one of the first websites to come up with the idea of charging their users with an extra 6.8% tax. The website detects when visitors are using IE7 and issues a pop-up warning about the tax if the users purchasing goods from their website. The purpose of this approach is to encourage their users to upgrade to a modern browser for a better browsing experience of their website, thus avoiding the extra charge at the same time.

Why are people still using IE7?

One of the biggest reasons people are still stuck with IE7 is because some of them are still using Microsoft’s older operating systems. IE7 came pre-installed when Windows Vista was first launched in 2006, an operating system that many PC owners still use. Microsoft has also used several methods in an attempt to get its users to upgrade, but some organisations find it very expensive and time consuming to get all of their PC’s upgraded to modern standards. Most importantly it is our fault as developers as in the past we have spent hours optimising websites for IE7. This has only encouraged IE7 users to continue their browsing experience with IE7.

What can we do encourage users to upgrade their browsers?

We can use similar tactics like the Australian retailer “Kogan”.
Create landing pages that can detect if the users are using IE7 and provide them with a warning and upgrade solution.
Use badges and small banners somewhere on your website to encourage users to upgrade. Last year a website called “The IE7 Countdown” launched to dedicate the countdown of IE7. They provide code snippets that can be easily embedded on your website to display tiny badges and banners. www.theie7countdown.com

I think it is time to stop spending unnecessary time fixing IE7 bugs and instead using that time to do something more productive.

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What's Wrong With My Website?

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:56:12 +0000

You can do all the checking you like, but it’s quite likely that you will never find all the glitches that your users will find.

There are a number of ways you can keep up to date with issues with your site. I’ve added a list of some easy and cheap methods:

Track your error pages

Google Analytics is a free option, great for small businesses. If you modify your code on your error pages, you can check regularly for broken links and problem pages (these may even be broken links from other sites or links typed in by users).

With this knowledge, you can fix issues with your site, request that other sites linking to you update their links, or create some custom content that people seem to want to find.

Here’s a link to the instructions, Keemo has written up.

Check out your goal funnel

Here you can identify issues (not necessarily just errors), with your conversion path. This may uncover a particular problem page, which puts users off buying or signing up.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you can set this up quite easily by changing the settings and adding each url used for a purchase process. Other Analytics packages allow you to do this also.

Now, about that 10 page checkout process…

Monitor your server status

If you’ve got an advertising campaign on the go, it’s important to check for server outages. Sign up to something like Monatastic, which will send you an email every time you need to pause your advertising and kick the server.

Ask your users

You can install a couple of feedback tools which can ask your users about their experience of the site, or view what they do. Use ClickTale for videoing your users path, Google Talk Chatback to let them ask questions or talk to you, and 4Q to ask them how their experience was once they have finished.

More fantastic tips on fixing usability issues with your website here: Conversion Rate Experts.

Fresh eyes

Get someone else to look at it. Ask them to complete a set of tasks, and talk to them while they’re doing it. When you’ve designed a process, it’s obviously logical to you, but is it logical to everyone else?

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404 Pages Made Easy

Mark Mayne — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:54:23 +0000

Google has just launched a new feature in webmaster tools which helps users create custom 404 pages. Custom 404 pages are of course a great way to help your users navigate through to relevant pages if they type in a wrong URL or get lost. A regular 404 page will often put users off or make them think that your site doesn’t exist. Many webmasters overlook custom 404 pages but with this new widget they should be able to create one within a matter of minutes.

404 page

Google is of course a strong believer of custom 404 pages and recently dedicated an entire week to 404 pages. Google is not the only believer as a quick search custom 404 pages in Google will provide you with plenty of sites offering tips on how to optimise your 404 pages. They include, what links are best to include and how to write exciting and enticing text. Some of them are well worth the read. Although there is some debate over the finer details I believe in just keeping things simple. When users arrive on your 404 page they essentially just want to get to where they are going. They don’t want to be provided with hundred of different options and long blocks of text. The other thing worth noting is that 404 pages, in some cases can improve bounce rates.

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Usability Design Nightmare

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:47:35 +0000

Mircosoft have put ‘undo’ next to ‘save’ in their new version of Office:

What were they thinking?

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Heather Mills Sorted Her Website Out

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:17:26 +0000

Well, I was going to write a post today saying that now Heather’s finalised her divorce and been awarded £24.3 Million she can afford to sort her website out… but she beat me to it!

Heather’s site was criticised, and traffic was compared similarly to an obscure fishing website. I was asked to comment when I was on BBC Radio Manchester last year. I’ve got nothing against Heather, I think she gets a hard time and I don’t think she copes well in interviews. But I had to agree that her website was a shocker!

The new website was launched shortly after the judgement, and is a great improvement. It’s easier to navigate and you’re not threatened with a barrage of charity banners as you were with the old site.

You can have a look at her old site using the web.archive.org here: Heather Mills Old Website.

Read more about Heather Mills’ site relaunch on Webuser.

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Why Build Accessible Websites?

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:37:06 +0000

Google are developing an Accessible search that gives precedence to websites built to web standards
Older people, who are not necessarily disabled often have some of the following problems:

arthritus – may not be able to use the mouse; keyboard shortcuts are important.
poor eyesight – large text size and good contrasting colours can help
hearing difficulties – text version of audio content can be useful.

It’s a legal requirement in the UK that your website is reasonably accessible to people with various disabilities.
The Internet can be extremely important for disabled people, as demonstrated by this quote from Lynn Holdsworth, screen reader user, Web Developer and Programmer “For me being online is everything. It’s my hi-fi, my source of income, my supermarket, my telephone. It’s my way in.”
Roughly 8.5 million people in the UK have some form of disability, and 2 million people are visually impaired. That’s a huge number of people to exclude.
Accessibly websites built to W3C standards tend to have lighter pages, with less code, which mean less work for your server and lower server costs.
Lighter pages also mean they load faster, so your visitors will have a better experience.
Well structured, well coded, accessible website will be easier for all users to navigate.
Search Engine Spiders are effectively blind – they can’t see your images, they won’t appreciate your fancy heading image, and they don’t know what’s going on in your Flash movie… unless you mark-up your code correctly.
Appropriate page titles and descriptions written uniquely for each page improves accessibility, but also increases your chances for each page to be listed in the search engines for a variety of topics. Leading to higher traffic.
The Internet is becoming more mobile, more people are using mobile browsing, which means lots of different browsers, screen sizes and disabled functions such as JavaScript, Flash and images.
Accessible sites are easier to view using a slow connection, for example Mobile Internet or dial up. This is because pages are lighter, styles and images can be turned off and the content of the page can still be read.

Accessible Websites… Salford's got the idea

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:12:53 +0000

The Government is getting serious about its commitment to accessibility, and Salford City Council are leading the way with an excellent example.

To the untrained eye, the website doesn’t seem anything out of the ordinary – it doesn’t sing, or dance. But the site is extremely easy to navigate, information is organised very well, and the developers have gone to great lengths to ensure the site can be used by people with various disabilities. They even give the link to a ~~free~~ text to speech software program to help visually impaired users.

Have a read of their accessibility statement, and see if there are things you could do to make your website more accessible. It’s tough to ensure your site is completely compliant, but best efforts will pay off. It’s not just disabled users you will be helping – it will help people with non standard browsers – people using PDA’s or mobile Internet for example.

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New Labour Party Scandal Sees Vote Share Plummet!

Simon Wharton — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:00:01 +0000

Well perhaps that’s over stating it just a little bit but I was rather surprised to see that the labour party website doesn’t have a custom 404 page. Why is that important? Well, if someone follows a link to a page that no longer exists or follows a link that has a slight mis spelling, if there is no custom 404 page, then they’re lost. For the uninitiated a 404 is the response a web server delivers when it can’t find the page that is requested on a website.

Why is this important? Well, I was following a link from the marvellous Stuart Bruce Blog. He’s pointing at something interesting on the Labour party website. Mr Bruce is a chap who is quite rightly widely read, one of the leaders in thought in the UK blogosphere but the love he is sending to the piece of interest on the Labour party site is wasted in this instance. The thing is, a custom 404 page is an easy fix. It takes maybe half an hour to deploy and covers a huge amount of sins. This is what happens if you get a 404 via the PushON website:

See the diference? Full branding and navigation so that you’ve got a chance of keeping hold of the viewer. you never know, they may want to vote for you! (Or spend some money if you’re a business).

Should I test the site to see if it is accessible? That’s a whole new can of worms.

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Updated

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After a quick search, we noticed we currently outrank the BBC, Telegraph and The Times for the term Labour Party Scandal*. Nice.

* As previously mentioned, Google is fickle and results fluctuate regularly. This post is correct at the time of writing

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Eye Tracking For Website Useability

Katrina Gallagher — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:04:31 +0000

I stumbled upon a website for a company that specialises in web usability; they’ve produced a video explaining eye tracking and how you can use the results to gain an insight into how people view your site and whether they are using it as you would expect.

They kindly published this video to YouTube so I could embed in the blog.
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Although this is a promotional video, I thought it was useful because it explains in simple terms why you would want to use eye tracking, and what the resulting maps could indicate.

I also found an interesting report by Eyetrack III with the results for a journalist site. The report outlines some of the main findings and explains some of the conclusions they came to. In this study for example, they found that navigation placed at the top of a homepage rather than side performed best, i.e. it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest period for time.

I wonder which test they need to find out how effective splash pages are…

Nielsen produced a report on eye tracking, some of the resulting statements are expressed as concrete rules – which I wouldn’t agree with – but their reports and articles have some excellent advice which can be used as guidance when planning web pages.

More details about eye tracking

Visit Etre for more info – and I’d definitely recommend reading their blog, they have some excellent information on the topic… and some cute geek cushions…
Five Days Five Heatmaps- findings from a study of five major online retail websites
What I Learned From Eye Tracking – outputs from an eye tracking study conducted for best-selling business author, Seth Godin
What we saw whan we looked though their eyes – article based on the Eyetrack III reports
F shaped pattern for reading content – Nielsen report and recommendations.

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