When you go to a real shop, you bring a number of expectations with you. In most cases, you expect to be able to pick up a product and get a nice close look at it. You get a feel for the size, the weight and the quality of it. Or, with items such as books or magazines, you get a chance to have a thumb through and get a feel for it.

Then, once you’ve had a little look at it, you might want to ask an assistant a question. Granted, they may not always know the answer, but I always appreciate a shop where the assistants try to help and answer questions.

Why can’t these niceties carry through to the world of online shopping more often?

Of course, you’ll never be able to pickup the product and have a feel, but most online shops leave something to be desired with the images they provide. A lot of the time, they’re small, poor quality, inaccurate or just don’t give you enough of an idea for the size or scale of a product.

Speaking to the shop owner or an assistant is hardly ever made to be a big feature with online shops. Sure, you could find the contact page and track down the right email address or phone number, but why not flaunt it along-side the products? Why not say ‘Got a question about this product? Just phone or email us and we’d be glad to help’? It would make it such a better experience.

In the real world, if someone opens a shop, you expect them to know their products intimately, but with some online shops, it can feel as if the people running it are just selling what they can – not what they know.

I know this is not the case with all online shops. There are many shops which make it easy to get in touch and ask questions about their products and make use of large images, etc. but there’s still an awful lot of online shops which feel cold and impersonal with small images, lack of information about their products, hard-to-find contact details and staff which are slow to respond to enquiries.

Photo by dougww

I love the mantra of ‘Release early and release often’. It keeps you on your toes, keeps the project fresh and keeps things moving, but most of all, it makes you decide what’s necessary and what’s not. It helps to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Releasing early and often also gives you the opportunity to be a little experimental. A feature that took two days to complete and is a little rough around the edges as a result is much easier to drop than a feature which takes two weeks to complete and is completely refined. With the two-day feature, if it is successful, it can be built upon and end up just as refined as the two week option, but it’s less of a gamble and gives you more agility.

Taking the mantra too far can only lead to pain, in my opinion. Releasing early and often is all good and well if it’s just a little rough around the edges.. As a user, you can deal with that, right? But if it’s full of bugs and isn’t usable and degrades the user’s experience, they won’t see it as agility and good project management skills, they’ll find it frustrating and amateurish.

I won’t name names, because that’s not nice but I was trying to use something this weekend which stank of release early, release buggy. The software would’ve been great, if it only worked! Too many bugs and too many rough edges made me annoyed and in the end, made me look elsewhere for a better, more usable solution.

As with everything, there’s a happy medium to be found. People can accept the odd bug and rough edge, but if it degrades the experience too much, they’re likely to look elsewhere.

Photo by LePacheco

Hot on the heels of the release of Chrome, Google’s adoption of the WebKit rendering engine is already pushing things forward for other browsers.

Gears is a JavaScript API which (using Google’s explanation) is “an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to web browsers”. Gears allows applications to run offline, interact with files and folders on a user’s machine and generally run more like a desktop application than a website.

Gears is now available for the main browsers in Windows, Mac and Linux and is set to become a big part of future web applications. If you haven’t already, download it now!

It’s now been a few days since Google made the beta version of their new browser, Chrome, publicly available. At first glance, it looks fairly same-old, same-old. The interface is quite nice and sleek, includes all the core features you’d expect from a browser (but not many “extras” at the moment since it’s just a beta release).

According to Google, the main improvements are under the hood – making it load faster, handle JavaScript better and with better stability. And when things do go wrong and a site makes the browser crash, Google claims it will not take down the entire browser – just the offending tab. Sounds nice. Similarly, if one tab is hung up on a long running task, the other tabs will be unaffected.

It’s still in it’s early stages and so it’s probably a little early to try completely switching to it, but I’d definitely recommend downloading it and giving it a try.

It’s only available for Windows at the moment, with releases for Mac and Linux apparently not too far off. I’m a little surprised they didn’t manage a simultaneous release across the three platforms (taking into account Google’s might) but since they’re mainly trying to compete with Internet Explorer, I guess it makes sense that the main focus initially has been a Windows release.

According to a poll for the ISP Plusnet, a mere 3% of the 15.3 million broadband users in the UK plan to cancel their connection to save money with the looming “credit crunch”.

With more and more content becoming available on the internet, it therefore makes sense that they also say 30% of UK broadband users would prefer to give up their magazine subscriptions, alcohol and cigarettes than their internet connection.

Good for the online industry, bad for the magazine industry.

[From Gizmodo]