I’ve read a lot of hype that says that Amazon is pushing the device to make more sales, but I really believe that is a pure content device. It’s a great reader, beautiful HD player and runs all the Android apps once you get out of the Amazon App store.

In contrast to most critics I actually prefer the size of the Fire to the iPad and I don’t really have any issues with the Silk web browser. My wife carries it with her everywhere- It’s the perfect purse device.  She has a Nook e-reader before and we’ve installed the Nook App so she has her previously purchased Barnes and Noble’s e-books on her Amazon Kindle Fire.

You really have to have an Amazon prime membership to get the most out of  the Fire. With the a Prime membership you can stream videos to it and participate in the Kindle lending library.

If you’ve been on Facebook the day a change is made you’ve certainly seen it in your news feed.  Today, for example, Facebook changed up the contents of the primary feed, made the photos larger and added a widget to the right sidebar about what your friends are doing. If your friends feed is like mine, then it is full of all manner of whining about how people want facebook to switch back and hints on how to find the old interface. On the otherhand, I like it. It’s an improvement. I think it makes facebook more useful for me while removing steps I took in their old interface to see what I wanted to see.

If you’ve ever redesigned a web site, you’ve heard about how much people hate change. My favorite redesign story about how people hate change was when I worked at The Commercial Appeal a decade ago and we launched their new design in January 2000. The design eliminated frames from a Pagemill design and started to implement CSS– we designed the whole thing in Dreamweaver. It wasn’t a great design, but a huge step forward. Faithful readers of The Commercial Appeal’s web site reacted like we had dug up Elvis and moved him to a hidden grave.

One particular set of emails from a retired lady who had moved to Chattanooga stood out from the rest. The day after the redesign she reamed us for moving things around and messing up her daily return to Memphis via the Internet. Her email was pretty similar to the other 1000 or so emails we received about the redesign. What was unique about this lady from Chattanooga was the 2nd email we received from her two weeks later. She emailed to apologize for her first email and to let us know she actually liked the new design and now everything she wanted was easier to find.

So, the moral of the story is Users Hate Change, but eventually with a good well-tested design, they will come around and use the site.  I promise you all those people swearing at Facebook today will have forgotten about it in a weeks time.

For me, I like change– for better or worse. Innovation and improvement are hard. If you are unwilling to change you’ll never know if that next step is two steps forward or a step backward.

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Jakob Nielsen has a great related post on how users are resistant to change: Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign

It really surprised me that IE 7 was finalized in November 2006– almost 5 years ago. I was excited when it was released so we could get rid of the dreadful IE 6. W3 Schools show that IE 7 makes up 6 percent of the current browser market share. As more people abandon Windows XP that will decrease quickly, but if you are viewing this in IE 7 I want to encourage you to move your online life to a new platform– upgrade IE or download firefox, safari or chrome.

Curious as to what their site looked like, I checked it out and wow. It was still my site design, 10 years later. I showed one of my colleagues the site and he said it had “stood the test of time” and didn’t look that out of date (for a 10 year old design).  I think this was one of the first sites I wrote a little vbscript and created a database for a school comparison tool. Of course, we started picking it apart… left aligned, tables, too many images, background image, etc.

Even though I use Firefox on a daily basis, I always make sure I thoroughly test sites in IE because that’s the browser being used by the majority of our visitors. I normally don’t give our sites as thorough a viewing in Chrome and Safari as I do Firefox and IE and often times I just ignore Opera.

I have to admit that on personal sites I tend to ignore earlier versions of browser (like IE6). Even for a while a ran banner telling IE6 users to upgrade their browser.

• “If you emphasize everything, then nothing will be important.”
• “The purpose of the home page is to get people off of the home page.”
• “Unless a visual element directly supports a key conversion action, it should be removed.”

Personally, I like his  Design & Coding rap better, but I like them all.

Avoid opening new windows when at all possible—even when linking to pages off site. The web was made for links and when you send a user off to a valuable web site through a link they appreciate you keeping their browsing experience intact and will remember that you referred them to useful site and will come back to you (of course this assumes that we only link to valuable sites).

On the other hand opening a link in a new window opens a new browser on the user’s computer without their consent and breaks the back button where they cannot use normal usability constraints to find their way back to your site.  If you have ever watched a novice web user use a site where links are opening in new windows, then you know you are completely confusing them with those new windows and at the end of their browsing session they could have seven or eight windows open.

At times it is appropriate to pop-open a new window for special features such as flash animation, video or podcast. When we do pop-open the window it’s nice to make sure we are controlling the size of it to make sure the user can still the the original content behind it and know they are in a new window and if you want to be really nice you can provide a nice close button so the user can get rid of that window.

Here’s some good reads on not forcing a new window on the user

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Don’t force windows on new users
• Dive into accessibility – Not opening new windows
• Discussion on opening new browser windows
• Accessibility tips

If you’re not sure whether or not you should open or new window, then err on the side of the user and just don’t open it.