Do We Leave The 20 Percent?
As we contemplate all of the improvements we want to make to the EzineArticles membership interface in 2008, a huge majority of the features requires AJAX features that would significantly add a lot of value to 80% of our users who have javascript enabled…at the expense of the minority of members who don’t have it enabled.
Essentially, our interface has been dumbed down to the lowest common tools to be usable by the widest audience possible. If we were a brand new site without any legacy concerns (like supporting odd browsers or users without javascript enabled), we’d make the decision to leave them behind and only focus on a membership base that uses ‘current’ tools.
Your thoughts? We’re all about usability but we’re at odds with not being able to take the next leap with AJAX functionality knowing that it’ll essentially break the user interface for ‘old’ members who have javascript disabled.
One solution: Detect if a user has javascript turned on; if so, feed them the AJAX improved interface; if not, feed them the current interface as it is now. The problem: There is a 1-2% of users that may be using browser plug ins or other mysterious things that will cause us to wrongly identify their javascriptness or lack thereof.
What to do?
~~*~~
Ohhh… you know Chris all the trouble I had figuring out RSS? I was finally able to figure it out with your help.. but if I hadn’t had that I might not have ever pursued it further.
If you change stuff I just hope there will be support. I am an artist first and my mind plays well on the right side.. Left side stuff might leave me out in the cold.
Brrrr…
~~*~~
[Reply]