The Browser Wars
I recently had to clean install Windows 10 on my Surface Book. Even though I like Edge (don’t judge me!), I need Google Chrome when I work on writing code for my portfolio because the developer tools in Chrome is second to none. So like everyone with a new OS installation, I opened the default browser i.e Edge and searched from “chrome” in the default search engine Bing.
The above image shows what happened — Microsoft promoting it’s own ad about the advantages of using Edge. This was the first time I saw this promotion and it caught my eye. Windows 10 in fact has several ways to do this. Here are some other ways:
I started thinking about the rationale behind these design decisions. Folks at Microsoft probably might have been put under pressure to promote Edge when users are using other competitive browsers. Keeping aside the verdict of whether the solutions are effective, this is a very interesting problem to solve:
- How would you promote something or increase the visibility of your own product when there are competitive products that are people are used to and/or are familiar with?
- How frequent should these notifications come up so that they are not interrupting?
- When should they show up in the first place?
- How should the content (copy, imagery) read and look like to be effective?
My analysis
The notifications (Windows calls them as Tips) appear whenever there is a decision that the user made (in this case, opening Chrome or Firefox instead of Edge or Downloading Chrome when you have Edge) and are timed periodically just like cookies on a website that expire after a given amount of time. Looking at the screenshots above, it’s safe to say that these are ads. This kind of intervention could be an effective conversion as it is timed at the moment of decision making as opposed to ads that follow you everywhere you go on the internet and just frustrating you more than anything else.
By the way Google does this on the other side. So which browser is faster? :)
How would you solve this problem if you were the designer? Comment below :)
