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Some Useful Stats for Thinking About Your Website

I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.

As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:

Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.

(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

My comments:

(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.

(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.

(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.

Best of Both Worlds: Offline Access for Online Applications

Google reports today that they are rolling out offline access for their Google Docs application and that will be just the first as they utilize their Open Source browser extension Google Gears to download and upload data from your hard drive to the Web in the background. This will allow you to use Google docs (and in the future other apps, I’ve already seen it in use on a nifty to-do app called Remember the Milk) whether or not you’re near an internet connection.

According to Macworld “Google has lofty aspirations that Apps – with Docs in tow – will extend its reach into medium-size and large companies, and to that end has been boosting its security and administration features, particularly in its fee-based Premier version.”

This is good news because I believe one of the major hurtles Web-based applications have to overcome is availability (at least until every corner of the earth has Wi-fi or its next iteration). Although the aggressively functional Zoho suite of online apps offers offline access, it’s Google’s success that will drive the industry toward Web apps. As offline access becomes a typical feature, adoption of online apps will widen and developers will be able to create better and more varied applications.

The key to Web-based applications is not just the convenience of never having to synch devices or being able to collaborate with teams (or coordinate with family), but the ease with which data can be used from one app to enhance another – say for instance, you could pull financial data in from an accounting app and manipulate it in a spreadsheet app, without downloading or synchronizing. It remains to be seen exactly how the new functionality will handle this “mashed up” data, but as with all of this technology, it’s a work in progress.