It’s a start. I was reading on, looking for the rest of the article. What does this mean to us as web professionals? It just seems like the introduction.

This article stops a long way short of providing usable information. It’s just defined the problem. If you’ve been involved with clients with web sites, you know this already. It begs the questions….

With this knowlede;
What do we do about it?
How can we help ourselves and our clients?

Awareness is the first step. Dealing with it intelligently is the next. Any ideas?

I know someone who uses IE7 with the built in search bar, ignores that and goes to the yahoo home page to get to the search box where she types google.com to get to google search.

I am not kidding… she is in financial services in a pretty high position too.

Yep, I’ve seen stuff like this too, we all have. It’s pretty frustrating to watch and sit through, but it’s important do so, and then to understand your client.

These people are our clients and user base and financial masters. Just because we’re web and techno savvy, it does not mean our clients are. They’re paying the bills. It’s a valuable lesson to observe.

Sometimes our clients, the CEO and CFO, are not as savvy as our users.

Some more questions.
1. How can we sell concepts like RSS, Twitter, Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, all with potential productivity benefits, to a client that can barely use a search engine.

2. How can we sell web site concepts to a key project stakeholder, when the user base is much more web savvy than they are?

3. What happens to the site after the implementation project is complete, and we walk away? Have they the skills to understand and maintain the concepts of the system we have provided them with?

I have no evidence to back this, but I believe that tabbed browsing has increased user’s patience because they have the option of opening the tab up in a new background window. This allows them to wait for that page to load in the background.

That would also mean that each page that is open receives even less attention from the user, as he can only look at one tab at a time. Also, there is less barrier to navigating away if you get bored, because simply closing the current tab instantly moves to the next thing that was opened.

I too would be interested in any actual study that has measured this.

I am not kidding… she is in financial services in a pretty high position too.

If it doesn’t load fast, instantly engage us and keep us engaged, then we get bored and move on — a trait that has been exacerbated by tabbed browsing.

I have no evidence to back this, but I believe that tabbed browsing has increased user’s patience because they have the option of opening the tab up in a new background window. This allows them to wait for that page to load in the background.