[thelist] Jumping In With Both Feet

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Tue Dec 11 09:43:53 CST 2001


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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To:   thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject:  Re: [thelist] Jumping In With Both Feet


>>> should web development be driving with the
>>> hand brake on because of users who have made this decision?
>
>> That's one of the central principles of user-centred design, yes.

>So what you're saying is that all websites should be designed with
specific
>users of that site in mind, then?

Ideally, yes, or failing the specific users (which can take a lot of
research to
understand how your site's users differ from the user universe), users in
general.

>And that there is no point in a user
>upgrading to a new browser with improved performance and enhanced or
>additional features?

If there were really significant benefits for the user, sure. But I don't
see
anything which users actually care about.

>What happens when a large company decides to update its desktop policy to
>state that their PCs will all run Netscape 6 instead of IE 5?

A company which did this without an impact analysis would already be in
trouble. Rebuilding the intranet would certainly be part of that. But if
you've
built the system with server-side smarts (rather than static HTML), it's
not
impossible. Swap out the templates in your CMS and you're in business.

>The company
>intranet, which the developer has tailored specifically for IE5 using
>proprietary tags and IE-centric scripts, will require a major overhaul,

I'm a user - I don't care.

>This isn't just about making the developers' lives easier (although that
>must be a factor in this industry), but the subsequent reduction of future
>development times and costs

How is that making the user's life easier?

>and the ability for more "non-standard users" to
>be able to develop websites that work across all browsers - desktop based
or
>not - without changing a single piece of code.

I'm a user - I don't care.

>> Moving towards the separation of content from design using
>> XHTML, CSS and the like will mean that more pages will be legible in
both
>> legacy and standards-compliant browsers (albeit with different styling
and
>> functional capabilities).
>
> ie, it won't look or work properly. There are few users (and fewer
clients)
> who would put up with that.

>Hold on there ... who said anything about it "not working properly"?

'different functional capabilities'

>I'm
>sure that you'll agree that users and clients, in the main, will be happy
to
>accept a website (or web application) that functions as intended at the
>concept and planning stage, prior to it's release.

I'm still not seeing any users which truely need more client-side
functionality.
Design it so it doesn't need browser-specific features.

>The main development of the public
>and intranet access websites is keyed on the fact that the design and code
>must work for all these users.

And that's your problem to solve. Now I can see that for you, coding once
is ideal,
rather than doing complex browser detection and serving.
But I'm a user and I don't care.

>In summary, there's no question of the site "not working" for people with
>older browsers - the idea is that it will work in these instances, just
>without bandwidth-heavy CSS and Javascript-laden files that won't work
>properly anyway. With a bit more project planning and a bit less "copy and
>paste" from a four year old code library, most sites can be improved by a
>little more attention to the code.

So why do I care about upgrading to a browser which supports these
'bandwidth-heavy' features.

> Really, what *user* benefits does anything
> introduced since then actually offer?

>None, if you take ease of use, download speed,

No significant improvements here (note: "significant")

>interface functionality

Nothing new I need

>data security out of the equation.

Other than the expiring certificates problem (which was surely a bug
anyway),
no improvement.


Cheers
Martin (sends bill for advocacy services rendered to client: L Beelzebub)


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