Some Interesting Usability Statistics
More and more people are realising the importance of Web Usability and the benefits it can bring. A quick search on Google will yield thousands of examples.
My aim for this article is not to explain usability in detail or explain it’s need and importance, rather I’m going to present some very interesting statistics of how users use a website depending on various factors.
All the stats should be self-explanatory…
*These statistics have been gathered from various sources outlined below.
Success Rates and Experience
| Web Experience | Site-Specific Tasks | Web-Wide Tasks |
| Low | 59% | 52% |
| High | 72% | 67% |
Average Time Spent on the homepage
| Web Experience | Time on Homepage (Seconds) |
| Low | 35 |
| High | 25 |
You only have minimum time to get the message across otherwise you will lose your visitor. Apple probably do it the best:
Page Views by the Screenful
| Time on Homepage (seconds) | Users who Scrolled (%) | Screenfuls (1024×768) Scrolled | |
| 1st Visit | 31 | 23% | 0.8 |
| 2nd Visit | 25 | 16% | 0.8 |
| 3rd Visit | 22 | 16% | 0.8 |
| 4th Visit | 19 | 14% | 0.5 |
Homepage vs. Interior Pages
| Web Experience | Time Spent on Homepage (Seconds) | Time Spent on Interior Page (Seconds) |
| Low | 35 | 60 |
| High | 25 | 45 |
Scrolling by Page Type
| Users Who Scrolled | |
| Homepage, 1st Visit | 23% |
| Homepage, 4th & later visits | 14% |
| Interior Pages | 42% |
Most Hated Advertising Techniques
| Design Element | Users who answered “Negatively” or Very Negatively” |
| Pops-up in front of your window | 95% |
| Loads Slowly | 94% |
| Tries to trick you into clicking it | 94% |
| Does not have a close button | 93% |
| Covers what you are trying to see | 93% |
| Doesn’t say what it is for | 92% |
| Moves content around | 92% |
| Occupies most of the page | 90% |
| Blinks on and off | 87% |
| Floats across the screen | 79% |
| Automatically play sound | 79% |
Browser Statistics (March 2002-2010)
| IE8 | IE7 | IE6 | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera | |
| 2002 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 36.70% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| 2003 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 63.40% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 1.20% |
| 2004 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 68.20% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 1.40% |
| 2005 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 63.60% | 18.90% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 1.90% |
| 2006 | 0.00% | 0.60% | 58.80% | 24.50% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 1.50% |
| 2007 | 0.00% | 18.00% | 38.70% | 31.80% | 0.00% | 1.60% | 1.60% |
| 2008 | 0.00% | 24.90% | 28.90% | 39.10% | 0.00% | 2.20% | 1.40% |
| 2009 | 1.40% | 24.90% | 17.00% | 46.50% | 4.20% | 3.10% | 2.30% |
| 2010 | 15.30% | 10.70% | 8.90% | 46.20% | 12.30% | 3.70% | 2.20% |
All web developers will be glad to see IE6 on the decrease however approx 9% of users still use IE6 so if your an online business, it’s vital to have your website working with IE6.
JavaScript Statistics (January 2000-2008)
| JavaScript On | JavaScript Off | |
| 2000 | 80% | 20% |
| 2001 | 81% | 19% |
| 2002 | 88% | 12% |
| 2003 | 89% | 11% |
| 2004 | 92% | 8% |
| 2005 | 89% | 11% |
| 2006 | 90% | 10% |
| 2007 | 94% | 6% |
| 2008 | 95% | 5% |
Display Resolution (January 2000-2010)
| Higher | 1024×768 | 800×600 | 640×480 | Unknown | |
| 2000 | 4% | 25% | 56% | 11% | 4% |
| 2001 | 5% | 29% | 55% | 6% | 5% |
| 2002 | 6% | 34% | 52% | 3% | 5% |
| 2003 | 6% | 40% | 47% | 2% | 5% |
| 2004 | 10% | 47% | 37% | 1% | 5% |
| 2005 | 12% | 53% | 30% | 0% | 5% |
| 2006 | 17% | 57% | 20% | 0% | 6% |
| 2007 | 26% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 6% |
| 2008 | 38% | 48% | 8% | 0% | 6% |
| 2009 | 57% | 36% | 4% | 0% | 3% |
| 2010 | 76% | 20% | 1% | 0% | 3% |
Colour Depth
| 16,777,216 | 65,536 | 256 | |
| 2000 | 34% | 54% | 12% |
| 2001 | 37% | 55% | 8% |
| 2002 | 43% | 50% | 7% |
| 2003 | 51% | 44% | 5% |
| 2004 | 65% | 31% | 4% |
| 2005 | 72% | 25% | 3% |
| 2006 | 81% | 16% | 3% |
| 2007 | 86% | 11% | 2% |
| 2008 | 90% | 8% | 2% |
| 2009 | 95% | 4% | 1% |
| 2010 | 97% | 3% | 0% |
Sources:
- Book: Prioritizing Web Usability
- Web: W3Schools
Interesting article, interesting stats. With your browsers stats, what was the sample, and what site were they pulled from? That’s pretty good numbers for Firefox, and not so much for Safari, so I’m just curious where they came from.
Hi Jacob,
I took the browser stats from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and if I’m correct, the stats for this are gathers from all their users (which would probably go into the hundreds of thousands).
This is probably why Firefox is quite high! People who use their site are more technical than the general user and so likely to use Firefox.
However there is a good table on Wikipedia which compares browser stats across a few different sites and Firefox sits at about 30% which is likely more accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table