[WEB4LIB] Re: browser differences

[Steve Cramer]

The Journal of Electronic Publishing published an interesting study of users' 
perception of Flash-enable sites.

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/raney.html
An Experimental Study: The Relationship Between Multimedia Features and 
Information Retrieval 

Here are two of the findings:

"While no differences were found in terms of the actual completion of the 
tasks, significant differences were found in terms of enjoyment and recall. 
Specifically, users reported more enjoyment of the Flash sites than the HTML 
sites. This finding is further substantiated by a single item that asked the 
respondents to identify which site they preferred more: 85.9 percent identified
the Flash site."

"Also, participants were able to recall more information from the 
Flash-enhanced sites than from the HTML sites."

The Morrisville might well agree.

--Steve

__________________________________________
Steve Cramer
Business Librarian
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
smcramer at uncg.edu
336-256-0346

<rich at richardwiggins.com> wrote:

> Again, I personally don't like Flash as a means of window dressing a home
> page.   I don't like it for a number of reasons, the main one being that I
> want to get to information, not watch cartoons.  At a given site, there
> might be a coalition of "power users" (as defined by RK) and "serious book
> readers" and "NPR listeners" and "folks who hate Bugs Bunny" and "people on
> dialup modems" and others who would prefer eschewing Flash, but I think the
> only way to measure this for a given site would be to do surveys or focus
> groups.