UX Booth has a great article on Counting Clicks. The every famous “3 Click Rule”, which is something like everyone should get to where they want to go in 3 clicks, is one of those “rules” that we aren’t fans of.
Not because we don’t like the challenge of making everything on your website available within 3 clicks. There might be times where it is applicable. As a general rule it places unnessary contrains on the architecture that might not really be a benefit to the user.
For example large navigation systems are not helpful for people to make decisions with. In that scenario people might want 4 clicks with smaller navigation items.
The truth is that hard, fast, and specific rules like this don’t apply to everything. Just like saying that a glass of wine a day is good for you doesn’t apply to everyone.
– Minutes per use: 9.6 (Greystripe) – Uses per user: 19.9 (Greystripe) – Only 20% of users return to use the app after the first day (Pinch Media) – After a month, this number drops to 5% (Pinch Media) – “39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently (Compete via MediaPost, April 2009)
Here are some charts taken from data from W3Schools.com, the charts tell an interesting story of trends of the past and a look into whats to come. The data has been collected from W3Schools’ log-files over a period of five years. You can find this data on the W3School website.
Click on the chart to see larger. Browser Statistics Monitor Display Resolution Operating Systems Monitor Color Depth
Download the Excel Document I used to create these charts. W3School_Stats.xlsx
Here’s some tools we use in house for development:
ScreenGrab:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146 Screengrab saves entire webpages as images. It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images. The following little keywords are at the request of those who can’t remember the name ScreenGrab! and want searches to work. It takes screen shots, screenshots – that is, shots, of web pages.
Pixel Perfect:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7943 Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML. * Requires Firebug
ColorZilla 2.0:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271 With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there’s more…
IE Tab:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419 This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
PageDiff 1.3.0:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4274 Pagediff is a simple page compare application. It helps web developers and designers to see HTML-code(text) differences between web pages. It doesn’t take original page source. It takes browser generated DOM compliant view source. It omits Doctype declaration and HTML tags. After installation, to use this, one has to 1. Right click on a page & select ‘Start DIFF’ (this action saves the current page to memory), 2. Go to the page which one wants to compare (with the saved one) and 3. Right click on the page & select ‘Show DIFF’.
Html Validator:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249 HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The extension can validate the HTML sent by the server or the HTML in the memory (after Ajax execution). The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page. The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP (SGML Parser). Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server. Each algorithm has advantages and inconvenients. The program will give you the choice at startup. But mostly, - The SGML parser is the same program than the one running behind validator.w3.org. - Tidy has accessibility check for the 3 levels defined in WAI
Console²:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1815 As of Firefox 1.5, the JavaScript Console is used not only for JavaScript errors, but for CSS errors as well. This extension takes this into account by providing a simple possibility to display errors by type. Console² let’s you display errors filtered by type (Errors, Warnings, Messages), language (JavaScript, CSS, XML) and context (Chrome, Content). Furthermore it provides a simple search box (as seen in the History and Bookmarks sidebars), hiding of duplicates, sidebar optimizations, a customizable toolbar and some more accessibility improvements.
Not only has the stock market lost ground since last fall, but so has the reputation of Corporate America in the eyes of consumers. Seven out of 11 industries saw their reputation decline last year from 2006 and 16 of the companies with the worst marks fell even further, according to the Harris Interactive Reputation QuotientTM (RQ) survey.
The top 10 companies on this year’s list in order of ranking include: 1) Google 2) Johnson & Johnson 3) Intel Corporation 4) General Mills 5) Kraft Foods 6) Berkshire-Hathaway Inc. 7) 3M Company 8) The Coca-Cola Company 9) Honda Motor Co. 10) Microsoft.
For a full list of the top 60 companies and other findings visit: www.harrisinteractive.com.
The six areas that the RQ survey focus on that influence consumer behavior include the following along with the companies that scored highest in these categories:
Social Responsibility – Whole Foods, Google, General Mills, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson Emotional Appeal – Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, General Mills, Google, 3M Company Financial Performance – Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Procter & Gamble Products & Services – Johnson & Johnson, 3M Company, Intel, Google, P&G Vision & Leadership – Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Apple Workplace Environment – Google, Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, Intel, Kraft
