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| My nephew tries out Deb Brown’s Galaxy Tab. (It works with Flash.) |
A story with two points.
In New York City, I asked my nephew to use my iPad to find restaurants. As he clicked through to the restaurant websites, some rendered well on the iPad, some didn’t. One site didn’t come up at all, just a background color. We finally guessed it was an all-Flash website, incompatible with iPad.
And that brings us to Point Number One:
Businesses with Flash-based websites lose potential customers.
When I tweeted about this, one person replied that we should have bought an Android-based tablet. “Should have” is not the issue. That’s trying to reconfigure customers to suit yourself. Some of your customers did buy iPads. You have to adapt to suit them, or cut them out. Cutting out incompatible customers is a valid business decision. Just make sure that is what you mean to do.
And that brings us to Point Number Two:
“Our job is not to configure customers, it is to configure our business to serve customers.”
Liz Strauss, at BlogWorld Expo 2009
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We had a similar experience yesterday in meeting with a small community’s village president. He would love to be using the forms that local assistance providers have developed, but he doesn’t have MS Word. He is relatively tech savvy for this age and uses Open Office. Well we all know how finicky Word gets with forms and formatting, so its no surprise they broke in Open Office. We’re going to convert them to PDF forms for him, but usability is something a creator still needs to think about, perhaps more than ever.
Jennifer, that’s a great parallel. Thanks for sharing it!
Becky,
It was my pleasure to play with techy toys with Colton. Ease of use, quick downloads and great content — three leading things viewers want. If you don’t provide that – you can ‘forget about it’ as they say in New York!
Deb Brown
No truer words have ever been spoken. I I take that back, It’s the old “the customer doesn’t know what they want” mentality. It might not drive the majority of your subscribers away but something worse happens, they won’t be raving about you.
As a web developer I can’t begin to describe how important your comments in this post are! Having a proper mobile website that renders well not just on a certain platform but across all mobile devices is as important as having a website that renders well across all browsers and not just IE6!