Daily Archives: July 22, 2009

Bill Vass’ top reasons to use Open Source software

You might not have seen Bill Vass’ blog article series on the topic of the top reasons to use and adopt Open Source software; and as it’s such an insightful series of articles I thought I’d bring it to your attention here.

Each one is highly data driven and contains insight that you probably haven’t seen before but is useful to be aware of when positioning Open Source to a CTO, a CIO or an IT Director, because of Bill viewpoints (having come from a CIO and CTO background). Often when you see this sort of thing written it can be rather subjective, almost ‘faith based’, so I’m always on the lookout for good factual information that is contextually relevant.

Bill Vass’ top reasons to use and adopt open source:

    1. Improved security

    1. Reduced procurement times

    1. Avoid vendor lock in

    1. Reduced costs

    1. Better quality

  1. Enhance functionality

And before you mention it, I know Bill already summarised these articles in his lead-in piece “The Open Source Light at the End of the Proprietary Tunnel…“, but it was such a great set of articles it seems a shame not to highlight them them to you!

Jakob Nielsen: “Mobile User Experience is Miserable”

Latest research into mobile web user experience says that overall the experience is “miserable”, and cites the major issues with Mobile web usages, as well as looking at overall “success” rates which, although improved from results of research in the mid-1990’s are much lower than typical PC and workstation results.

It is well worth a read for those looking at optimising for mobile readership and audience and the full report is available here: https://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

This new report names two major factors to improving the aforementioned success rates; that is sites designed specifically with mobile use in mind and improvement and innovations in phone design (smart phones and touch screens perform best).

Jakob Nielsen, ex-Sun Staff member and Distinguished Engineer is famous for his work in the field of “User Experience”, and his site is a key resource to getting advice and best practice in terms of web, and other types of, user experience design.