TAKA DESIGNS

A common design pattern that is being used extensively on mobile apps has been the use of icons to illustrate specific functions. By now, there are specific icons that almost everyone is familiar with. An icon of a trash can represents deleting something or a printer represents the print function. But what happens when icons are used that users are unfamiliar with?

I’ve been using the Gmail app on my iPad and it helps illustrate a great example. There were quite a few icons that I was completely unfamiliar with, and as a result, I had never used them.

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Recently I had to update my email on websites that I regularly use. As I began the process, I quickly discovered how insecure some them were. On websites such as Bank of America, Citi and Foursquare, it was frighteningly simple to change my email address with very little security or confirmation.  While others such as Ebay, Facebook and Twitter had some of the best security combining confirmation links sent to the new email address, unique security codes and a confirmation box to re-enter your password even though you are logged in.

Chances are many of you probably use at least a few of these websites.  So I thought it would be interesting to detail the best and worst examples of them.

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StumbleUpon was one of those sites that I had always heard about, but never really spent much time looking into, until more recently. A few days ago, I decided to visit their website and was quickly frustrated because I was having a hard time finding out how their service worked.

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It’s been a long time coming, but support is finally being dropped for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) on many high profile sites I manage at UCLA such as http://ucla.edu. You might be asking what took so long since sites like Google dropped support for IE6 long ago. For us, it was because of our users, and it’s something that you should always consider.

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Google recently announced that the number of people using its web browser Chrome tripled from 40 million to 120 million users within 1 year. According to a recent report its market share is now almost 10%. I remember back when Firefox was first released, reaching a 10% market share at a time when Internet Explorer dominated the web was a pretty big deal.

I was curious to see what the most recent stats were for http://ucla.edu and sure enough, Chrome is at about 9%. Here is a comparison breakdown from November 2009 and November 2010.

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