世論 What Japan Thinks

Last month japan.internet.com reported the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research regarding the use of support call centres. They interviewed 330 people employed in both the public and private sectors; 83.0% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 14.5% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

I’ve once phoned a support line in Japanese for a problem with my ISP’s free router and the ADSL performance. The ISP was another division of the company I work for, and the notebook PC I was trying to connect with was a company-issue machine with the standard company installed software, but still they started the script from “Are you sure you’re plugged in?” The problem was something to do with performance being dreadful – I’d changed providers but the throughtput dropped from a few megs a second to barely dial-up speeds, and uploading even the shortest mail would time out. I finally convinced them it was their fault, not mine, that the line was slow, but it still took them another week or so to do whatever they needed to do at their end to restore the speed.
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japan.internet.com continued its recent series of surveys investigating people’s habits around technology, with this survey, performed in conjunction with Cross Marketing, looking at desktop setup and mass-storage devices. They interviewed by means of an internet questionnaire 300 people from all over the country. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and the age grouping too was split into six equally sized samples, with the samples of teenagers (ages 18 and 19 only), twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and so on up to those in their sixties each containing 50 people.

One of the things I’ve noticed with my colleagues at work is that a lot of them have at least a third of their desktop covered with icons, using it as a temporary (more like semi-permanent!) holding area for mail attachments, current projects and the like, a behaviour I never really understood.

One other custom I’d like to see investigated by this series of polls is one on how people use filtering on their mailer. Again, I’ve noticed my software engineer colleagues often have a huge inbox with a massive amount of unread mail (we’re talking thousands!) then manually moving mail into target folders. Similarly, not many turn on message threading, nor do they archive their inbox, which seems to me like a massive waste of time.
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As a sort of follow-on from the survey on mobile phone handedness, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, had a look at what sort of computer and monitor people used. They interview 379 internet users, 50.1% male, 16.3% in their teens, 16.1% in their twenties, 16.4% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 17.2% in their fifties, and 17.7% sixty or over.

I believe this survey is looking at home computers rather than office machines, although this is not clearly stated within the report.

They did in fact look at a few other factors that seem more interesting the just screen resolution, but sadly they have not made these results public. However, the resolution information may prove useful to web designers, and seems to back up the statistics I see from my own blog: 1024 x 768 is the benchmark. However, whether or not people run their browsers fullscreen is a question for another survey!
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