Posts Tagged development

It seems that in the past eLearning developers as a whole had turned a blind eye to cross-browser compatibility, myself included. For years we (hotelearning) created eLearning which was intended for a particular audience, who would, without doubt be using a particular browser, in our case Internet Explorer 6+.

It made our job easy – if the course functioned correctly in IE, then it was ready for deployment. We really had no reason to cross the compatibility bridge till we came to it.

Recently, some of our projects have become completely web-based, and only delivered on-line to an unknown audience, and we really have no idea which browser or operating system our users are utilizing. Browsers such as Firefox and Safari have seen a signifigant increase in adoption over the past few years, and must be taken seriously. Below are some general browser usage statistics as of March 2009.

IE 6.0+ – 57%

Firefox 1.5+ – 31%

Safari – 6%

Opera – 1%

For us to ignore roughly 38% of our audience would be to ignore 38% of our potential customer base, and that was just not acceptable. Our eLearning needed to be cross-browser compatible and yours should be too. It was time to cross the bridge.

So in an effort to try to make our content available to as large an audience as possible, we created a cross-browser compatible interface. In terms of development, it may have taken a bit more time. We found though that we really didn’t have to make many, if any, sacrifices to our design or user experience. Infact, our interface could be considered simpler and more user friendly.

So what is the point of creating a cross-browser compatible user interface? You’ll be able to reach more customers, and those customers viewing the content on different browsers will have consistent functionality and a consistent look.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.