Array Studio Reading List - a list of useful books

Our reading list January 17, 2007

photo by brothercake.

Recently we wanted to experiment with Amazon shops, so we have decided to setup a store with books we would would recommend - essentially our reading list. Books vary from those about web design and web programming to books about running a business (a must for anyone wanting to run their own business or even if you are only freelancing).

I hope you find our book recommendations useful.

We would also like to hear back from you. Have you read a good book that we haven’t included? Let us know and we’ll add it to our list.

The CAPTCHA Alternatives December 9, 2006

Most people know what CAPTCHA is and if they don’t then I am sure that they have seen one. Furthermore, I am sure that everyone has been molested by bad CAPTCHA. Once I tried to register at a forum and it took me 8 times to get the CAPTCHA right - 8 times! I had to register at that forum, but if I didn’t after couple of tries I would just presume that the CAPTCHA isn’t working and I would have closed the browser.

Of course CAPTCHA is very useful and it can help you reduce spam, false/automatic registrations, etc. But at the same time is a big accessibility and usability problem - which means that your site or web app can lose precious visitors/users. In fact inaccessibility is such a big problem that there’s W3C document outlining CAPTCHA problems and possible solutions.

All this means that there are plenty of people searching for an alternative way to tell computers and humans apart. Here are some of the proposed alternatives and fixes…
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Marlboro smokers use IE August 17, 2006

Today, I’ve stumbled upon real gem on Daily WTF blog. It appears that people at Marlboro are very concerned with web standards and they want their site to support all browsers… Or not.

As Daily WTF notes when you visit Marlboro.com with FireFox you only get a blank page. This effectively eliminates more than 10% of visitors. As if that’s not enough they also decided that usual redirection methods are not for them (for example, sending 300 response code, META refresh or setting window.location). They have some strange ideas on how people should be redirected.

• create empty link
• change it’s href
• invoke click() method (IE only)

I guess that they though this is simpler and more effective.

If you’d like to see complete redirect code visit either Marlboro.com or The Daily WTF entry

Web App Conversion Funnel August 4, 2006

When you are building a web application you think that you can presume how people will use it and you build it a certain way. You presume that a lot of visitors will signup for free plan or free trial. You presume that people who register will actually login.

Of course these presumptions are often completely wrong. People use your web app in strangest ways. A lot of them, or to be more precise most of them, won’t even consider signing up, even though you offer them a fabulous free plan. Even those who register, you would think that they will actually login at least once, but some of them don’t.

Usually it’s good if 5-10% of your visitors actually signup (if you have higher percentage - you must be doing something right). Also in each step (casual visitor, trial signup, login, paying customer) you will probably lose high percentage of your visitors (in some even up to 90%). So, basically you need a lot of casual visitors to get few paying customers.

The most useful thing you can do is to track how people use your web app and where they usually give up. Vitamin features an excellent article on this subject: “How to measure the success of your web app”. It talks about the conversion funnel which can be used to represent steps through which users go through. You can create a detailed funnel model and use it to track what people are doing and when they are giving up on you app. For example:

If 30 per cent of your visitors are viewing your sign-up page, but only 2 per cent are actually signing up, you’ll want to redesign your sign-up page.

The conclusion is that you should track everything and you should try to fix stuff that is high in the funnel, i.e. the places where you lose most of your visitors. So, if you are building or consider building web app read Vitamin’s article and start tracking everything.