Design vs Art Blog

I got excited when I received an email from Nokia announcing the new Nokia Music Store. OK, I didn’t get excited at all, Nokia has been sending me promises of good service for a long time. Without success.

I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.

The new Music Store

Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.    

My point

This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.

We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?

Popularity: 54% [?]

Why a merge between Microsoft and Yahoo! could be bad for the designer community? We know how bad Internet Explorer is and we also know that Microsoft does not want to adopt many standards. Even worse, its tactics to promote IE are a little bit obscure.

Bad Company + Bad Company = Really Bad Company

Yesterday I was checking the MSN Game Zone, a MSN section that has some free online games. I was shocked when I read that MSN Games can only be played if the user has Internet Explorer. Then I thought, maybe this is not fine and maybe a merge of Microsoft and Yahoo! is not a good idea.

What if Microsoft makes most of Yahoo! services IE-only compatible? Then, a software that does not respect standards will become more and more popular. This means more headaches for web designers and that websites will start having more bugs, with a decrease in quality, usability and user experience. 

Popularity: 15% [?]