How do people see your site?
How do people see your site?
Survey of professional photographers viewing habits
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Note that this is a 2004 article – retained for archive purposes
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.
By 2007 the mix has not changed much – more people are using LCD screens and bigger ones at that… By 2015 there are phones, tablets and wide gamut LCD monitors at increasingly high resolutions.
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 | 1×12″ 1×15″ |
| Screen resolutions: | 2 at 1024×768 9 at 1152×870 (864) or 1280×854 (960) 20 at 1280×1024 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.
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
Some links expire – replaced by ones from Archive.org, the WayBackMachine (WB)
- 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 (WB) - 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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More photography business related articles
Business related articles (50+) are listed on the Photo-business page.
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- Will it sell? - I'm often asked about selling prints
- Photography - making a living from it?
- When to turn down work
- Marketing for photographers - 5 'M's
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