How do people see your site?

Survey of professional photographers viewing habits

Below are some results of a small survey carried out of members of the ProDIG mailing list. ProDIG is a (UK based) list for -professional- image makers, with an international membership.

The survey (2004)

This information has been gleaned from 32 replies.

Whilst most people completed all the details, a couple of items were missing.

Questions allowed multiple responses.

Computer type

23 Mac users	3 using OS 9.? 21 using OSX variants
13 PC users	3 using Win98 1 using ME 2 using 2000 1 using NT 4 6 using XP

Screen type

18 using CRT's	12 screens are 19" or less 15 screens are above 19"
8 members are using LCD/TFT screens
2 using laptops	1x12" 1x15"
Screen resolutions:	2 at 1024x768 9 at 1152x870 (864) or 1280x854 (960) 20 at 1280x1024 and above

7 are hoping to soon be moving to LCD/TFT screens.

These 7 people planning on moving to LCD/TFT screens for internet work are likely to be running them at their native resolution of 1280 x 1024

24 using calibrated screens

Browsing style

• 23 browse at full screen
• 8 browse at less than full screen

Browser use

• 4 use netscape
• 18 use Safari
• 13 use IE various versions
• 1 uses Omniweb
• 1 uses Camino
• 2 use Opera
• 4 use Mozilla

Conclusions and discussion

The survey was only intended to give a qualitative view of the web browsing setup of professional photographers.

It would seem that the Apple Macintosh platform is still preferred and that most people have moved to OSX.

Overall, Safari and IE are the browsers of choice.

Many use calibrated screens (as would be expected in this profession) however this has a somewhat variable effect on web graphics (see article on web colour)

Large screens are common and the majority view their pages at full screen size.

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From the point of view of someone designing a site for photographers, it would seem clear that you must test your site on PCs and Macs and give some attention to what pages will look like at full size on big screens.

There has been quite a bit of work on browsing habits (Keith used to do HCI research some years ago) and some useful links are included here and in our usability/design page

Web usage patterns

http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/egif_document.asp?docnum=804
Document based on UK government study of browser usage patterns in people accessing e-Government sites
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/paper/sg.htm
Academic paper describing some detailed studies of navigational and site visiting patterns
http://www.uie.com/browse/user_behavior/
Interesting articles about user behaviour

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Northlight Images is based in Leicester in the UK and supplies Commercial Photography services
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