investigation
survey
reasons for performing this exercise
This survey will help me make the web site accessible and compatible for all. I will learn about the different pieces of hardware that impinge upon web browsing performance (memory, screen resolutions etc). I will also try to determine the most commonly used web browsers and screen readers to understand what software the site needs to be compatible with. I will be emailing this survey to over 100 different internet users.
The main purpose of this initial survey is to discover what both the majority and minority of end-users require. The PSD partners have already demanded that it must be accessible to all.
I have decided to split the survey into four questions. Each of these will be multiple choice questions. I will be keeping the survey questions uncomplicated because I feel that simplicity is always the most effective stance in early stages of web site development. More complex questions will be used in the refining of the 2nd prototype later on.
analysis of survey results
The survey has been very successful. In two days I have collected just over a hundred sets of results. These will definitely effect the development of the web site. The results are displayed below:
Most end-users will be using Microsoft Internet Explorer so it is essential that the web site works perfectly in this browser. However what I found most surprising was the fact that 10% of the end-users use Opera with Voice. This means that the PSD web site must be easy to navigate when even using a screen reader to be accessible to all users.
As expected the most popular operating system was Microsoft Windows with 64%. However this means that 24% of Windows users are not using Internet Explorer for some reason. Maybe this group of people are more choosey when it comes to surfing the web and it may in fact be harder to provide a good experience for them. A good thing about this group is that they may be able to provide me with some valuable insights in the prototyping process.
The most commonly used screen resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels, therefore the web site design must be crafted with this in mind. But it must also be highly scalable so it functions well in all the other reasonable resolutions.
According to the survey's results most people would be able to handle more demanding multimedia elements (i.e. flash, inappropriate applets, etc) but because the PSD partners want the web site to be accessible to all and because some internet users do not have a decent amount of memory these will be not be used.
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