recent studies of user behavior on the web

I'm working on a project where the question has come up about the validity of what was once recognized as a "fear" or reluctance on the part of users to download anything to their hard drive because of the potential for a virus or other hesitations. My belief is that any hesitation to download a straight up PDF comes from the extra time and clicks, the overhead involved.

Does anyone know of any recent -- last 2 years -- study of user behavior that includes data on downloading files from websites?

I appreciate any leads toward good, solid, up-to-date information about user online behavior.

thanks,
Kay

Tags: behavior, research, user

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Permalink Reply by frank gruger on February 18, 2010 at 1:28am

Hi Kay,

If you're talking specifically about PDFs apparently there was a pretty nasty security flaw involving people posting trojan PDFs:

"A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9.3 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2 and Acrobat 8.2 for Windows and Macintosh. As described in Security Bulletin APSB10-06, this vulnerability (CVE-2010-0186) could subvert the domain sandbox and make unauthorized cross-domain requests. In addition, a critical vulnerability (CVE-2010-0188) has been identified that could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system."

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-07.html

This is a pretty specific piece. I agree with your implication that the days of users fearing downloads, in general,are a thing of the past.

Frank

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Permalink Reply by Kay Burnett on February 18, 2010 at 7:59am

thanks Frank.

my point in the discussion was that the information contained in the PDF must be supplemental and not mainstream to the user experience. I think the browsing user would bypass the download because of extra time and effort involved but the committed user would download if it promised to be valuable information to supplement the experience.

nothing too technical. thanks for your note.
Kay