11 April 2009
Flickr photo by greensambaman
There’s an interesting article out that points to the fact that every day there are 10,000 canceled installations for Firefox; this meaning that each day 10,000 people download the Firefox installer, “fire up” the *.exe and then click “Cancel”. (A further 40,000 apparently downloaded the setup file, but didn’t even make it far enough to start and then subsequently cancel the installation)
Even more interesting were the reasons why the 10,000 canceled their install. A large part of the respondents were “confused” with some part of the install process (nearly half) while most of the other half identified that they did not have the proper permissions to complete the install.
Continued
30 November 2008
When developing any application, getting proper user feedback during the early stages is essential if you want to have the application suit your customers’ needs. Often this is done with staged tests, but with web applications you can have the benefit of using an online method of retrieving your users’ opinions.
However, doing so can be tricky. If you want to get feedback, you can implement your own system for soliciting it, however, this takes up extra time that could be used to further develop your core web application. Alternatively, there are some existing online services that can provide survey-like questionnaires to users, but honestly, these present more trouble to the user than they’re worth.
When I first started using Stack Overflow, I noticed that the feedback service they had been using, UserVoice, was an elegant and functional solution to this problem.
Continued