世論 What Japan Thinks

I don’t know if it’s just the sort of people I work with, but many people in the office seem to have half their Windows desktop strewn with icons. However, this recent survey from iShare into organising desktop icons found that such behaviour was the exception rather than the rule.

Demographics

Between the 30th of April and the 10th of May 2010 537 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the sample were male, 31.3% in their twenties, 32.2% in their thirties, and 36.5% in their forties.

I try to keep my icons down to under two columns on the left and just one or two on the right.

Another interesting related subject I should look out for is the use of tray icons – again, most of my colleagues have well over 15 on their machine, including default informational icons like the two touchpad-related ones our standard notebook computers come shipped with. I turn off all the ones I can as they are just a distraction, on the whole.
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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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