Engineers: Tripping the Web fantastic?

Recently at Electronic Products , we've debated several ideas for improving our Web site (http://electronic products.com). Most of these involve ways we could enhance the content of the site, while others address usability and speed issues.

Most of the suggestions were favored unanimously. However, a proposal that I advanced– that our site be friendly to all browsers, including text-based browsers like Lynx–was met with disinterest: “I don't think we need to concern ourselves with text-based browsers,” was one comment.

Well, perhaps. I've tried Lynx on occasion and have usually given up in frustration after visiting a few sites. Most are simply not designed with text browsers in mind, making them difficult to navigate and thus negating the browser's inherent speed advantage.

Some power users use the text browser Lynx for ultra-fast rendering of Web pages. Electronic Products' home page, when viewed this way, may look pretty, but it's not easily navigable. Should we care?

And users of such browsers undoubtedly represent a tiny minority. Still, it's not that difficult to design a site that's universally accessible–why not do everything we can to accommodate all visitors?

And to another of my proposals that our site be designed to load quickly even at 28.8 kbits/s, one respondent disagreed, saying, “I think most of our users have high-speed access to the Web.” I suppose this is true for our subscribers here in the U.S.–many of whom work for large and medium-sized corporations that can afford high-speed access for their employees.

However, many visitors to our site are from outside the U.S. where access to high-speed lines may be limited, to say the least, depending on the country. As I thought about this some more, I wondered if perhaps my 28.8-kbit/s worst-case scenario hadn't been conservative enough .

And what about those engineers here in North America with their high-speed access lines? Feeling a bit like the character Carrie Bradshaw on the television program “Sex and the City,” I asked myself the somewhat provocative question: Are engineers really equipped for high-speed access?

I'm not so sure. Associate Editor Christina Nickolas has told me that at her previous job–an engineering position at a small electronics company–most engineers didn't have any access to the Internet. I would hope that, today, this is more the exception than the rule.

Here at Electronic Products we have had high-speed Internet access for several years. However, that isn't the whole story. At home, I use a 56.6-kbit/s modem and am lucky to be able to connect consistently at 50,666 bits/s. When I'm traveling, I'm limited to 28.8 kbits/s and a 640 x 480-resolution screen. All this prompts the question: Should our Web site be designed only for users when they happen to be at work?

That wouldn't be my recommendation. Perhaps it's my engineering background that leads me to place such an emphasis on functionality in design, but I just don't see that it makes much sense to sacrifice even a little bit of usability for the sake of a me-too look and feel. I think visitors to our site would appreciate that too.

R. Pell, Editor-in-Chief