The big Mac meal – did you want a PC with that?

Posted in This Web Thing on Apr 28 by darryl | PrintText Resizer Text Resizer

If you watch TV (with all the product placements), or use twitter a lot, you could be forgiven for believing we are all about to become Mac users.  Further to this, today I read an article by Mark Nutter at Smashing Magazine, Five reasons why designers / developers are switching to Mac.

mac-pc

I found this interesting. Let’s be clear I am a PC, so much so that I turned up in this photo on FaceBook, which Jane Copeland cleverly tagged, “who wants to play One of These Things Is Not like the Other with the laptops?” Yes there is my red Dell in the middle of a sea of Macs.

smx_laptop1

I thought it required some more investigation. Not that Mark’s article may be wrong, I think that it is an opinion; not one necessarily backed by any empirical evidence, more anecdotal. I also note that in many instances he is right, about some of the great features Mac’s have, but there are also some faults, some of which he notes at the bottom.

Over the last few weeks I have been reviewing several interesting statistics. Firstly I was reviewing our hosting farms traffic statistics, which while we are a relatively small player, we do deliver nearly 100 million pages a month, so is a good starting point for trends.

While reviewing the stats I noticed something interesting. This was prior to reading Mark’s article, but after reading it I dug a little further.

Our statistics clearly show only 5% of access to our millions of pages to be from a Mac OS. That is not a huge percentage. In fact it is so small it raises several more important questions. More on that later. I discussed this with a colleague at News Limited who although not prepared to give specific numbers reinforced that their numbers were ‘very similar to mine’ albeit on a much higher scale.

Here is similar confirmation of these numbers, from W3 Counter from 63 million unique visits over 25,000 websites .

Without grabbing every stats report, my initial research is showing similar numbers between 4 and 6% across large numbers of hosting environments. I will look further into some larger samples as a further add-on to this post.

What does it mean though in the context of Mark Nutter’s article about developers moving to Macs? Ireckon that if it were true, and I don’t feel it is, there is a cause for concern. I believe that as part of the developer community, part of designing and developing is to be able to understand our users’ experience to enable us to make better products.

Thankfully much work in getting all developers to adhere to standards helps to eradicate some potential problems. But not all. While I believe you can be a good mechanic of a Ford and still drive a Holden (GM for US readers), to be an expert you need to ‘know’ your vehicle. And the facts are quite simple, 93% of ALL the known world’s internet users use Windows as an operating system to access the web. For better or worse that is the fact, and one we all have to live with and cater for.

Some items to consider:

  • 2 click mice. On recent conversion studies across some of our sites, the use of left and right clicks on pages was noticeable. How would a Mac developer interpret this or develop for it if their usage of those methods is different to the users?
  • Help & training manuals. How often do you see a help manual or training screen video where it is clear the screen is a Mac yet most of the users of that web product will be on a PC using Windows?  Should the Mac user / developer be spending more time using Windows or less? Shouldn’t the screenshots be all from the greater audiences view rather than the designer?
  • Should we bother? When usage of 800 x 600 screens dropped below 10 % we stopped supporting that as the native site and developed for 1024 and above. With Mac usage less than that should developers actual be concerned with Mac compliance? I believe we should but the question should be asked. And in reverse – if the numbers were reversed would Mac designers even bother getting sites compliant for PCs? I doubt it.

So my point really is 2 fold,

  1. Don’t believe everything you read from marketing and fan pages, just because we all love things that doesn’t necessarily stack up to being of usefulness to the mass market. I love butterscotch schnapps but it ain’t for everyone, and;
  2. It is important to pay attention to the users, and make sure we don’t drink our own bathwater in the development community. Make sure what you build is suitable for the users who pay your customers. That is who really matters.

Well that is what Ireckon anyway.

de.licio.usdiggemailfacebookfriendfeedgoogle bookmarkslinkedinmixxmyspacenetvibesnewsvineposterousredditrssstumbleupontechnoratitumblrtwitteryahoobuzzyahoomywebadd to favoritesmisterwongprint friendlyPDF

About darryl

ireckon's ceo and founder I seem to have been hardwired into the net before the first browsers arrived. some classify me as hyperactive but always passionate about the net and what we do. outside of work life family time, camping, reading and football fill the other gaps. Occassionally i sleep!

Entry Details: This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 5:20 pm, by darryl, and is filed under This Web Thing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print This!

6 Commentsleave a comment

  • Johnny Appleseed says:
    April 28, 2009

    Darryl, ever get the feeling all those other guys know something you don’t?

    In case you hadn’t heard, Macs now run Windows (even better than PCs, if you believe some tech publications). So you can test any browser on any platform – something you can’t do on a PC.

    Together with Apple’s superior hardware and software design and integration, this makes the Mac a no-brainer – or so I thought.

    Why go without all the Mac advantages (as outlined in the article you referenced) when you don’t even need to?

  • darryl says:
    April 28, 2009

    I know what you say but that doesn’t mean it is the way to go. There are plenty of Cons in that article too, although not as many as Macs do have.

    Each to his/her own.

    I have nothing against Macs, but reality is the world of users aren’t using them and that matters to me in understanding users.

    I hear lots of people like Smack too and it has some high points, but lets not go there.

    Shame you aren’t using your real name :)

  • John O'Brien says:
    April 28, 2009

    I repeat (yes, this is Johnny Appleseed without the alias): You can run any browser on any platform on a Mac. So you can see sites from every possible user’s perspective, including the Windows majority. How is this not better than a Windows-only PC in “understanding users”?

  • Steve Woodgate says:
    April 28, 2009

    I think a bigger issue than browsers is performance. If every road designer had a Ferrari provided by the office no doubt our transport network would be very different. Guess that’s why we still QA our flash on the oldest windows boxes we can find – because the customer experience is all that matters.

  • Scott Wallace says:
    May 14, 2009

    At the outset, let me say that I’m a Mac user. A ‘recent’ convert, although I gave up on Windows *many* years ago.

    Just to address a few of comments above:
    Re: Browser testing. You can use VirtualBox or VMware in the OS of your choice to emulate other environments for web development.

    Re: Right-click. All Macs have the ability to do secondary mouse clicks (that’s ‘right-click’ for the non-techies). Even Apple’s Mighty Mouse has more than 2 buttons. Non-Mac users keep rolling this one out and it’s simply no longer the case.

    Re: Superior Apple hardware. There’s nothing special or superior about Apple hardware. They spend a lot of time looking at cooling, layout and design and they make nice-looking computers but there’s nothing inherently better about the hardware.

    The Mac’s strength lies in Apple’s marriage of the Operating System and the hardware. When you know what combination of hardware your OS is going to run on, you can ensure that the OS has less bloat and runs with tried and tested drivers, keeping the kernel lean and stable. Any user-land applications can then be designed with fixed APIs to allow for tighter integration with the OS, keeping a uniform and consistent user experience. Both Windows and Linux (to pick on the other “popular” OSes) suffer from too much choice.

    Personally, I spend more time doing real “work” on the Mac than any other platform. When running Windows, Linux or Solaris on the desktop I spend more time “tinkering”, trying to get the OS into a state where I can do work.

    Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Linux (or Solaris for the big iron) on the server but the desktop user experience really is satisfying for the end-user who gives up their preconceptions and takes Mac and OS X for what it is — a clean, *modern* OS that really does get the job done.

  • darryl says:
    May 14, 2009

    Thanks Scott but I think you enhanced the point. Being the uber geek you are is fine, we can all profess our preferred option when we have time / know how to work this stuff out.

    The point of the post though was the interesting statistic that Macs account for only 5% of web traffic. And that as developers you need to understand what the users are using, not emulating what they are using, but actually using it.

    Not one of the environments nor hardware for any user is perfect, despite the fab boy stuff espoused about any platform. Man users have problems, Apple stuff up plenty, PC’s have problems, Windows have problems.

    For me I am interested in understanding my audience. If 95% of my market is on PC using windows then I need to be there with them.

    More importantly it amazes me how skewed marketing can be.

Leave a Reply