Just a plain list of interesting fact …

1. 60% of interactions with Search fail. [*]
2. Translation is a young profession with nearly half of professionals (48%) in their thirties. [*]
3. Dropbox, a cloud-based service that lets you easily access your content from any device, claims 45 million customers. [*]
4. The USA has more personal computers than the next 7 countries combined. [*]
5. Approximately 40% of browsers support HTML5 at present (Nov,2011), which may reach to 800+ million audiences. [*]
6. Pharma and medical device companies distrust certificates of accuracy and ISO certifications, relying more heavily on sample translations to assess quality. [*]
7. Users often gravitated to the search engine when the links on the page didn’t satisfy them in some way. [*]
8. China’s software and IT services industry grew 32.4 percent in revenue in 2011. [*]
9. Companies that offer translation services in many languages receive 67.46 percent of the client’s total volume. [*]
10. Ireland has ingredients to become world leader in technical writing. [*]
11. The font Courier is a librarian favorite and used by data entry companies as well. [*]
12. All Dr.Explain users enjoy a lifetime, free technical support with same-day response. [*]
13. 350 million Windows 7 devices will ship by the end of 2012. [*]
14. It is estimated that the cost of illiteracy to business and the US taxpayer is $20 billion per year. [*]
15. Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation. [*]
16. It’s 108% harder to understand information when reading from a mobile screen. [*]
17. You can’t create a folder named “con” in Windows. [*]
18. Over 38 million Americans accessed social media or blogs via their smartphones every single day in 2011. [*]
19. Most e-commerce purchases are made on desktop PCs. [*]
20. Consumer Preview build of Windows 8 has been downloaded one million times within the first day of availability. [*]
21. The font Sans-serif had several names in the past. Some of which are Egyptian, Antique, Grotesque, Doric, Heiti, Lineale, and Simplices. [*]
22. More than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link. [*]
23. Dr.Explain lets you easily update screenshots in illustrations when you release a new product version. [*]
24. One third of U.S. High School students now have iPhones. [*]
25. Those who sit upright are much happier than those who slouch. [*]
26. Big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop PC screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design. [*]
27. Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. [*]
28. The big data market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015 [*]
29. 56.2 percent of consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price. [*]
30. HTML5 is a lot more forgiving in its syntax than XHTML. [*]
31. Almost 90% of companies outsource at least some of their language service work. [*]
32. Joseph Chapline, the first noted technical write. In 1949, he wrote the user’s manual for the BINAC computer [*]
33. Baby duck syndrome is the tendency for users to ‘imprint’ on the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity to the first one. [*]
34. Dr.Explain’s unique built-in technology lets you create documentation for application screens and web pages almost automatically. [*]
35. 25% of all smartphone owners do most of their online browsing on their mobile phones instead of computers or laptops. [*]
36. YouTube contributed 5 percent of Google’s total annual revenue in 2011, estimate by Citigroup. [*]
37. The length of the page has no influence in the likelihood that a user will scroll down the page. [*]
38. By March 2011, video content had already made up for 69% of all mobile data traffic. [*]
39. There is a physical limitation on how much we can learn per day. [*]
40. The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood. [*]
41. 11% of the people in the world are left-handed. [*]
42. After mobile devices and desktop PCs, the 3rd main category of screen-based user experience is television. [*]
43. Almost half of enterprise cloud email is now Gmail. [*]
44. Red or green should not be used in the periphery of the visual field, but in the center. [*]
45. Dr.Explain has an image annotation tool to create stunning technical illustrations for help manuals and software documentation. [*]
46. One of the most salient usability issues for the mobile Web is the limited screen size. [*]
47. The median annual wage of U.S. technical writers was $64,610 in May 2011 [*]
48. On an average work day, a typist’s fingers travel 12.6 miles. [*]
49. 63% of translation or localization teams have five or fewer workers. [*]
50. 433 of the top 1,000 global websites addressed a single market in a single language with no attempt to address the needs of geo-lingual visitors. [*]
51. Most users felt that it was easier to shop on their desktop computers rather than on smartphones. [*]
52. Most B2B tasks will be done on the desktop. [*]
53. HTML5 is designed around the concept of accessibility of user. [*]
54. The most common password is 123456. [*]
55. CSS3 is not mandatory for HTML5 [*]
56. Download the Dr.Explain help authoring software from www.drexplain.com for free and without registration! [*]
57. Users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. [*]
58. The best style is the style you don’t notice. [*]
59. 48 million Europeans demand English-language eBooks due to they speak a second language. [*]
60. The new guideline is to optimize for widescreen monitors around 1440 pixels wide. [*]
61. Simplified Chinese forms 16 percent of the top languages group in emerging markets. [*]
62. The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is the oldest graphic file format on the Web. [*]
63. Windows XP’s market share dropped to 49.69% about a year ago. [*]
64. HTML Help 1.0 (HH 1.0) was released by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 4 in 1997. [*]
65. The global market for language services stood at US$26 billion in 2010. [*]
66. A high proportion of programmers are introverts, compared to the general population. [*]
67. The Dr.Explain help authoring software has a built-in screenshot capturing tool to automatically recognize UI controls and create numbered callouts for them. [*]
68. The Macintosh required mouse-driven software and didn’t even offer cursor keys for many years to prevent vendors from porting their DOS products. [*]
69. 72.1 percent of the consumers spend most or all of their time on sites in their own language. [*]
70. Almost 60 percent of users choose their passwords from a set of ten of alpha-numeric characters. [*]
71. The current DITA standard has over 500 semantic elements. [*]
72. When watching TV, you make one decision every 30–120 minutes. When surfing the Web, you make a decision every 10–120 seconds. [*]
73. Thumbshots are screenshots of online documents such as web page in small thumbnail sizes [*]
74. One long page is a simple choice, but makes it harder for users to access individual subtopics. [*]
75. The term user experience was brought to wider knowledge by Donald Norman in the mid-1990s. [*]
76. Only about 4% of the population has enough brainpower to perform complex cognitive tasks. [*]
77. About 25% of translators and interpreters are self employed, and of those, many worked part-time. [*]
78. For detailed information in 9 languages about Dr.Explain, please visit its website: www.drexplain.com. [*]
79. Average YouTube video duration is 2 minutes 46 seconds. [*]
80. Companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin. [*]
81. The Arab users often felt that international sites were more credible than Arabic sites. [*]
82. On average, a writers’s left hand does 56% of the typing. [*]
83. Reading aloud to children builds listening skills, increases a child’s attention span, and develops the ability to concentrate at length. [*]
84. Green is believed to increase concentration. [*]
85. Georgia typeface designed by Matthew Carter, was named after a tabloid headline reading “Alien heads found in Georgia“. [*]
86. User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide. [*]
87. 70% of software buyers rate user adoption as more important then features or functionality. [*]
88. People remember much more after reading if they retrieve information about the text from memory. Quizzes can help users remember more. [*]
89. Dr.Explain’s development team regularly brainstorms the question “How to minimize the number of GUI operations required to do common tasks?” [*]
90. There are huge individual differences in user performance: the top 25% of users are 2.4 times better than the bottom 25%. [*]
91. The word pixel is based on a contraction of pix (pictures) and el (element). [*]
92. To reduce cost of translation, information producers were four times more likely to favor training and professional development over other approaches. [*]
93. Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users. [*]
94. There is a font created for people with dyslexia. [*]
95. For specialized B2B content customers are more familiar with the English vocabulary than with their own language’s terminology. [*]
96. Nearly a third of users choose passwords with length is equal or less than six characters. [*]
97. At any less than four pixels high, fonts begin to become unreadable. [*]
98. Andrea Lewis was Microsoft’s first technical writer, joining the company in 1977. [*]
99. A study indicated that less content above the fold even encourages users to explore the content below the fold. [*]
100. Dr.Explain was initially called Catch-N-Doc because of its unique feature, an ability to capture screenshots and automatically document them. [*]
101. Most people have a biased idea as to the what the ‘average‘ person is like. [*]
102. The mouse cursor is probably the most intensely observed object on the screen. [*]
103. A format of 95 characters per line is read significantly faster than shorter line lengths. [*]
104. Microsoft has more than 10,000 patents. [*]
105. A common characteristic of all iPad use is that it’s heavily dominated by media consumption, not production. [*]
106. Color blindness could involve up to 1 in 20 visitors to your Web site. [*]
107. Pop-up box is the #1 most hated advertising design. [*]
108. On average, US onliners view 100 videos per month each. [*]
109. For many users the search engines are turning into ‘answer engines‘. [*]
110. The color yellow can cause nausea, so it is avoided in airplanes. [*]
111. Dr.Explain can use a single source to create Windows help files, printable PDF manuals, and online manuals. [*]
112. Children’s attention span is usually close to their age in minutes. [*]
113. F1 Help introduced to Lotus 1-2-3 in 1984. [*]
114. The number of QR codes scanned in 2011 represents a 1400% increase from the previous year. [*]
115. “All”, “any” and “every” are the three words that kill objectivity in most situations in technical and copy writing alike. [*]
116. Cloud computing will generate nearly 14 million jobs globally by 2015. [*]
117. On average, a Facebook user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month. [*]
118. Users dislike typing on the touchscreen and thus avoid doing this. [*]
119. The most hard-working people live in Korea and Russia. [*]
120. The Cupertino effect is the tendency of a spell checker to suggest or autocorrect inappropriate words to replace misspelled words and words not in its dictionary. [*]
121. More than 70 translations are available on the site and about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States. [*]
122. Dr.Explain’s licenses are permanent. There is no annual fee or extra fee for technical support. [*]
123. Users often just scann the area but didn’t actually read the number. [*]
124. 72.4 percent of consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language. [*]
125. WebP is a new image format that uses lossy compression. It was designed by Google to reduce image file size. [*]
126. Use of whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20%. [*]
127. Students who completed an elaborate test after reading the text remembered 145% more content after a week than students who simply read the text. [*]
128. People only read 28% of the text on a web page and decreased the more text there is on the page. [*]
129. Taking percentages out to the second decimal place makes them look bigger, because there are 2 extra digits. [*]
130. 100 people a year choke to death on ball-point pen. [*]
131. A workflow’s usability can be lowered when you require users to remember anything from one step to the next. [*]
132. The Xerox Alto (1973) was the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI). [*]
133. Dr.Explain has no time limit or project size limit in free trial mode. [*]
134. According to Forester, eBook sales are expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2016. [*]
135. One Google search produces about 0.2g of CO₂. A typical search session produces about the same amount of CO₂ as does boiling a kettle. [*]
136. The Swiss typographer who invented Helvetica, the world’s most familiar font, died with virtually no money. [*]
137. Over 300,000 users helped translate the Facebook site through the translations application. [*]
138. The majority of software developers believe scalability will be a major challenge in the next two years. [*]
139. The average adult’s attention span is 20 minutes. [*]
140. It is better to do usability testing with a higher sample size. The new magic number is 15 users, not 5 users. [*]
141. 44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child. [*]
142. The human eye can transfer data at the rate of approximately 8.75 megabits per second. [*]
143. It’s believed that playing videogames can help you multitask more efficiently. [*]
144. Dr.Explain significantly speeds up the authoring of help for software applications with extensive UI. [*]
145. Some sources claim that the golden ratio is commonly used in everyday design. [*]
146. Mobility and wireless network infrastructures are the big takers when it comes to IT budget planning for 2012. [*]
147. Most companies rely heavily on outsourcing, spending 60 to 100 percent of their total localization budget on third-party services. [*]
148. The UK’s 2 million iPhone owners are wasting 57 million working hours by playing games, each and every year. The real cost of those hours is £800 million. [*]
149. A whopping 92% of adults in America now own cell phones. [*]
150. The average US student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years (8 words per day). [*]
151. A factory in the US changed the color of the bathrooms to an unpleasant green and saw production increase by 8%. [*]
152. About 41 % of global product developers said that they expected to contract with more third-party localization companies within the next year. [*]
153. Temporary Microsoft employees are given an email address with a dash before the @ symbol. [*]
154. Users are being trained to limit themselves to pages included in the SERP listing. [*]
155. Dr.Explain lets you track project completeness through topic statuses and locking. [*]
156. YouTube accounts for 27% of all mobile video traffic in North America. [*]
157. The rule of thumb is to use the round number when you are talking theoretically, and the odd number when you are presenting hard data. [*]
158. Microsoft estimates that over 500,000,000 people use the Microsoft Office suite, which includes Word. [*]
159. For every one million words of content, fully automated machine translation could cost as much as $220,000 less than human translation (not factoring in post-editing costs). [*]
160. 10% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. [*]
161. A single mobile screen with almost no features may still require about 10 design changes to meet usability guidelines for mobile websites. [*]
162. Women aged 35 to 54 are the most active group in mobile socialization. [*]
163. Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it’s almost impossible to use it for good because they will avoid it every time. [*]
164. 78 percent of Germans do not want to read from a screen. [*]
165. YouTube is the 3rd most visited website in the world. [*]
166. Dr.Explain has a flexible and cost-effective licensing model. Its license price starts from as low as US$165 per user. [*]
167. In 3D, the camera should linger longer on establishing shots to give the audience time to look around the environment. [*]
168. Users aren’t more likely to resign to failure after three clicks versus a higher number such as 12 clicks. [*]
169. ‘QRC: Technical Reports for Quick Reader Comprehension’ may be among the first writing guides to propose techniques we now take for user assistance. [*]
170. To speed users through infrequent or complicated tasks, it’s often good to present a linear workflow with minimal disruptions or alternatives. [*]
171. Sans serif fonts have been proven to be more easily read online in body copy, while the opposite is true for printed text. [*]
172. In most cases users muddle through instead of reading the information a designer has provided. [*]
173. Users know where advertisements are and have learned to avoid them. [*]
174. 99% of all colorblind people are suffering from red-green color blindness. [*]
175. Information only stays in short-term memory for about 20 to 30 seconds. [*]
176. Users have extraordinarily inadequate research skills when it comes to solving problems on the Web. [*]
177. Dr.Explain enables users to add search functionality and keyword indexes to an online manual without programming, scripting, or database setup. [*]
178. Between 1% and 4% of people are believed to have synesthesia, a condition in which sensory input automatically triggers multiple senses. [*]
179. The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter blocks e-mails because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. [*]
180. Users wait only 4 seconds to begin to see a page loading when they first visit a website; and only 20 seconds for the entire page to have downloaded. [*]
181. Consumer ebook sales in the UK increased by 366% last year. [*]
182. Over half of info workers use three or more devices. [*]
183. Another name for a Microsoft Windows tutorial is “Crash Course“. [*]
184. When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores. [*]
185. The paperless office is a myth; people often want hardcopy. [*]
186. In the year 2010 43 % of teenagers now admit that texting is the main reason they get a cell phone. [*]
187. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. [*]
188. Dr.Explain is a 100% Unicode application and supports multibyte and RTL languages. For example, you can mix Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew on a help page. [*]
189. Over 50% of NASA employees are dyslexic. They have superb problem solving skills and excellent 3D and spatial awareness. [*]
190. A normal human being blinks 20 times in a minute, whereas a computer user blinks only 7 times a minute. [*]
191. Scrolling introduces 3 problems: takes more time, diverts attention, introduces the problem of reacquiring the previous location. [*]
192. Only 42 percent of translation providers surveyed said they give some type of discount, based on customer loyalty, frequency, or volume. [*]
193. Use max. 3 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes — a maximum of 18 words or 50-80 characters per line of text [*]
194. Touchable areas were too small in many mobile apps, as well as too close together, increasing the risk of touching the wrong one. [*]
195. Two-column pages are more likely to be read. [*]
196. There were 89 million PCs shipped in the first three months of 2012, an increase of 1.9 percent from a year earlier. [*]
197. Blue links are easier to click than black ones, even though black ones have higher visual contrast and are easier to see. [*]
198. Most enterprise tasks are done with desktop PCs. [*]
199. Dr.Explain supports Help ID for creating context-sensitive help files. [*]
200. Weinberg’s Law: a developer is unsuited to test his or her code. This holds for designers as well. [*]
201. In adults the order from most to least preferred colors tends to be blue-red-green-violet-orange-yellow, while in children it is red-blue-green-violet-orange-yellow. [*]
202. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. [*]
203. Average annual hours actually worked per American is 1779 hours. [*]
204. An eye tracking study displayed was that participants exhibited an F-shaped pattern when scanning web content. [*]
205. Bigger screens deliver hugely higher user productivity [*]
206. Price is not the most important criterion for life sciences companies when they purchase translation and localization services. [*]
207. Mark II by IBM (1963), provided word-for-word Russian language translations at the rate of about 5,000 words per hour. [*]
208. Machine translation technology, on average, can achieve 80 percent accuracy compared to a professional human translator. [*]
209. Preliminary data indicates that most Web videos should be short — typically 2–10 minutes. [*]
210. Dr.Explain provides a very simple GUI for editing help documentation. [*]
211. YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages. [*]
212. Mobile use will rise, but desktop computers will remain important, forcing companies to design for multiple platforms. [*]
213. By the end of 2016 there will 665 million media tablets in use worldwide. [*]
214. Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. [*]
215. It’s a common misconception that limited short-term memory implies that menus should be similarly limited to 7 items. [*]
216. People increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer. [*]
217. Among the world’s top 10 languages, English into Russian showed the most price compression since 2007. [*]
218. According to Nielsen, the average teenager age 13 to 17 now sends 3,339 texts per month. [*]
219. Research shows that customers cannot find what they’re looking for on Web sites about 60 percent of the time. [*]
220. Short-term memory famously holds only about 7 chunks of information, and these fade from your brain in about 20 seconds. [*]
221. The Dr.Explain application can automatically recognize and annotate about 150 types of user interface elements upon capturing a screenshot. [*]
222. 80 million Americans (ages 12 and up) now have cell phones that can send and receive emails. [*]
223. Reading the Privacy Policies of the websites you visit in a year would take you 76 workdays. [*]
224. User expectations for search quality are far beyond what today’s websites actually deliver. [*]
225. Non-physically impaired users have the same error rates as physically impaired on tasks that involve typing or pointing. [*]
226. A good practice may be to create the site in grayscale colors because elements should never rely solely on color. [*]
227. By the end of 2012 there will be 17 billion devices connected to the Internet. [*]
228. In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read e-books that were stored on CDs. [*]
229. Researchers have almost never seen people use advanced search. And when they do, they typically use it incorrectly. [*]
230. 28 percent of the top 1,000 global websites offered links to social media sites, with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube being the most popular ones. [*]
231. Users are typically rushed when using their mobile devices. [*]
232. Dr.Explain can add text variables and HTML code snippets to the content. [*]
233. Humans can translate somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 words a day. [*]
234. Serif fonts work great in headlines and headings because they give a special accent to a headline. [*]
235. Women dominate technical writing. [*]
236. 70% of all mobile searches result in action within one hour. That’s 30 minutes less than it takes the average person to respond to an email. [*]
237. A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe. [*]
238. Users experience the system as a whole, comprised of both the design and the implementation. [*]
239. Presently, streaming websites like Vimeo and YouTube employ HTML5 platform. [*]
240. Printed magazines or newspapers are the main source of QR codes. [*]
241. It’s always good to be forgiving of typos in search, this is crucial when supporting international users. [*]
242. Companies that are in favor of technology grow nearly three times as fast as companies that have mixed feelings about it or are against it. [*]
243. To use Dr.Explain, even a low-end computer running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7 will do. [*]
244. Encyclopedia Britannica has suspended making print editions and focused on an exclusive digital format with membership subscriptions. [*]
245. What users think and say they will do in focus groups and what they actually do in usability tests often differs. [*]
246. Only 1% of the population has a ‘genius’ IQ, one of 140 or higher. [*]
247. Over 14 million Americans scanned QR or bar codes on their mobile phones in June 2011. That’s one month. [*]
248. Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to ‘jazz up’ Web pages. [*]
249. Pixels on computer monitors are normally ‘square’; pixels in other systems are often ‘rectangular’. [*]
250. Only 12 of the top 100 global brands and just four of the top 50 U.S. online retailers translated a significant part of their corporate websites in Spanish. [*]
251. Smartphone users now spend an average of 24 minutes on social media applications every day. [*]
252. Road sign research discovered that it is easier to read lower-case letters while traveling at high speeds. [*]
253. Translators in China saw their income grow by 46.09% in 2010, while those living in Russia, Brazil, Israel, and Romania received pay raises of more than 25%. [*]
254. Dr.Explain is a help authoring tool with a user interface in 9 national languages. [*]
255. Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. [*]
256. The good app UI include domain-specific solutions that allow humans to focus on deeper issues while the software takes care of the mechanics. [*]
257. The QWERTY keyboard layout is 138 years old. [*]
258. HTML5 concept was originally raised by WHATWG in 2004 and then accepted by W3C in 2007. Finally, the firstly official draft was published in 2008. [*]
259. Andrew Frutiger’s font Frutiger took seven years to develop. [*]
260. Users spend almost 40% of their computer facing trying to get things to work or work better. [*]
261. Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. [*]
262. Color economy principle suggests using a maximum of 5+/-2 colors where the meaning must be remembered. [*]
263. Simon’s Law: Hierarchical structures reduce complexity. [*]

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Posted in Documentation Technical writing usability
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