Moonsunweb

While IE 8 expectations continue to grow, IE 7 continues to eat IE 6 market share. I have created the next bar diagram (using TheCounter data) which reflects the last five quarters of IE6, IE7 and Firefox.

IE 6 have lost about 17% of its market share in the past 5 quarters. If we just considered the past two quarters, where the boost provided by enthusiastic early adopters can be dismissed, IE6 has been losing around a 4% of market share per quarter. If this continues during 2008 IE 6 will have around 30% of market share by the fall of the year. 30% is a big market not to be considered by designers or web developers. A percentage such as 3% could be the point where we can finally forget about IE 6. Such a percentage, considering a 4% fall step, will not be achieved until the fall of 2009. However, i expect IE 6 to be almost gone by the arrival of summer 2009. I expect the fall step to speed dramatically in 2009. The reasons:

• New computers are mostly being shipped with IE 7 - even if Opera does not agree. One year and a half is a huge amount of time in computer era. We have to expect people to replace their old machines with new machines (specially laptops) which will be shipped with IE7.
• Vista will keep eating XP market share which means more IE7 adopters.
• The release of IE 8 will push people to update. We, consumers, do not like to be old fashioned. One thing is to be one model behind but being two models. When IE8 hits the news on TV, a lot of people will upgrade their browsers.

There is one thing Microsoft could do to speed the upgrade process up. Leave IE 7 upgrade out of Windows Genuine check. I have seen a lot of people with pirate copies of XP not upgrading their machines because of Windows Genuine does not allow them. If you want an improved product, buy a license of my operating system comes to say. If you are an illegal XP user, are you gonna buy a license of XP with Vista out there?. No way! However, if all illegal XP users could upgrade their browsers to IE7 or even better will be upgraded automatically, we could get rid off IE6 much quicker. While IE 6 is in the game, the image of Microsoft is damaged. Everyone involved in web design or development hates IE6 and Microsoft for not giving a replacement for such a long time. No, it is time to remove IE6 and Microsoft image will be grateful for.

Today i configured a list of 50 persona names using the 25 most common surnames and names of both male and female in the US in the 1990. Almost every software has some-kind of user module. The projects i am working on nowadays are not out of this thumb rule. Soon or later you have to populate your database with a meaningful dataset. I will be using this for mine, maybe you may use it.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the last months i have been really busy writing and debugging the last details of my master’s thesis. I have been occupied reading and sniffing around the most important online bookmark/tagging sites. This post describes the bookmark organization approach that i use nowadays.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe i am doing the first error of Web design assuming how the user mental model works based on my perception. Nonetheless, i think RSS seek follows this pattern

• User finds an interesting blog entry. The blog topic seems to be interested and the user decides to subscribe
• The seek for the RSS link begins
• Search for an RSS Icon (Standard web feed icon is broadly accepted) in the header or in the top positions of the navigation bar. Orange is usually the color
• Quick scroll in the navigation bar continuing the seek
• Search in the web site footer. RSS link is often there
• Click CTRL-F and search for rss
• If not found, I normally scroll carefully the navigation bar searching for things such as Syndicate or XML

I tend to use the CTRL-F search right after the icon seek. This is surely caused by my overdose of internet and bad information architecture experiences. I actually think that CTRL-F is the best browser feature.

To sum up, use an RSS icon and place it where it is really visible. Use text as well. RSS is often enough. Community Hacker Blog offers a good (a bit exaggerated) example:

The motivation to write this post comes from my today’s hard experience searching for an RSS button which by the way finished to be broken.

I am the youngest brother of a family of two. My sister is almost five years older than me. Life has taught me that being second is sometimes a big advantage. While i grew up, i met several situations where my sister had already faced trade offs. Her decisions and their consequences where the best mentor to take my own path. I took advantage from her school annotated old books, from her advice toward learning english outside the poor spanish educational system, from her experience doing the university in another city, from her work ethic. Moreover, my sister was the person that forced me to push myself through challenges. I am really different from my sister in several aspects but i am truly sure that the best sides of my character come from her experiences, which made my life lighter

In the world of software senior developers are like older brothers who coach us with their approach to problems and their design patterns. Great artists are for sure older brothers for designers. People to copy from. Americans are the european older brothers. We watched them in the last weeks buying iPhones. Their reactions and comments helped us to build our opinion. Being second sometimes means being ready to take the right decision.