GVU's Third WWW User Survey WWW Usage & Preferences Bulleted List

WWW Usage & Preferences Bulleted List

For this question, users were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 9 how often they print pages and how often they save pages.
Users, in general, print and save documents with approximately the same regularity (3.929 for print and 4.467 for save).
These numbers fall just below the center of the range of ratings meaning that users are slightly more likely not to save or print a particular document.
Prodigy users save pages less frequently than overall users (4.467 vs. 3.85), but print pages with about the same frequency (3.929 vs. 4.031).
Females save pages less frequently than males (4.065 vs. 4.543) but print them more frequently (4.445 vs. 3.827).

For this question, users were asked to rate each category based on how frequently they access this type of information.
The category with the highest regular usage score is "Replace Other Browsers" (6.685) which means using a web browser to access FTP, Gopher, WAIS, etc. databases.
Other types of information frequently accessed are: reference information (6.215), electronic news (5.716) and product information (5.115).
The least frequently accessed is shopping (2.588).
Prodigy users access all categories less regularly than overall users except for shopping (2.835 vs. 2.588) and newsgroups (3.542 vs. 3.303).
Females access newsgroups (3.508) and reference information (6.879) slightly more regularly than males. Females also use web browsers to replace other browsers more regularly than males (6.879 vs. 6.65).

For this question, we mean how many time you use your browser for a specific set of tasks or activities. We do not mean how many times you launch your browser per day.
41.95% of users use their browser 1 to 4 times a day. 30.61% use it more frequently (over 5 times a day), and 27.44% use it less frequently (less than once a day).
Users in Europe use their browser more frequently than users in the US (38.15% vs. 29.95% use it more than 5 times a day).
Prodigy users use their browsers much less frequently than overall users: 50.07% only use it a few times a week, and 34.33% use it 1 to 4 times a day.
Females use their browsers less frequently than males: 62.65% of females use it on a daily basis compared to 74.95% of males.

Overall, 46.44% of users have 11 to 50 items bookmarked/on their hotlist.
Users from Europe seem to have more items bookmarked/hotlisted than users from the US: 85.11% have over 11 compared to 75.35% for US users.
Although the curve for Prodigy users peaks at the same category as overall users, 11 to 50, a much larger percentage have only 1 to 10 items when compared to overall users (39.21% compared to 17.67%).
In general, females have less items bookmarked/hotlisted than males.

Exactly 50% of overall users report using their browser between 2 and 6 hours per week. Only 4.75% report using it for less time, while 45.26% report using it for more.
Users in Europe spend slightly more time using their browsers than user in the US. The curve for Europe peaks at 4 to 6 hours (25.33%) while the curve for the US peaks at 2 to 4 hours (26.88%).
Users from Prodigy spend less time per week using their browsers than overall users: 80.36% spend less than 6 hours per week compared to 54.75%. for overall users.
When compared to males, more females are found in the extremes of the range of values. 7.44% more females spend 0 to 4 hours using their browsers, but 1.18% more spend over 21 hours.

For this question, users were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 9 how much they liked pages which contained these different media types.
The most liked type is meta-indexes (7.75) followed closely by pages which are searchable (7.60).
The least preferred media type is movies with a rank of 4.04, which is still quite high.
Users from the US preferred images, meta-indexes, movies and sounds more than did users from Europe.
Prodigy users preferred meta-indexes, movies, sounds and text more than did overall users.
Females indicated a slightly increased preference for meta-indexes and text over males, but identical preferences in other categories.

For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.
The most common use of browsers is simply for browsing (82.63%) followed by entertainment (56.6%) and work (50.88%).
The category with the least number of responses is shopping (10.5%).
More users from Europe primarily use their browsers for academic research than users in the US (45.11% vs. 32.57%).
More Prodigy users reported that their primary use is either browsing, entertainment or ``other'' than did overall users.
More females reported that there primary use was educational than did males, and more males reported business research and entertainment as primary uses.

For this question, users were asked to classify themselves as one of the following: search oriented (likes to use querys and keyword searches), textually oriented (likes textual presentations), or visually oriented (likes graphic presentations).
The largest group classified themselves as visually oriented (46.06%). Next was textually oriented (29.77%) followed by search oriented (24.17%).
Many more users in the US classified themselves as visually oriented than did users in Europe (47.22% for US vs. 37.5% for Europe.)
The percentage of textually oriented users was slightly higher among Prodigy users (2.22% higher).
Only 38.16% of females (compared to 47.41% of males) classify themselves as visually oriented.

For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer.
Most users find out about WWW pages from friends and other pages (95.71%). Other popular sources are magazines (64.3%) and Usenet (58.79%).
More users in Europe find out about pages from Usenet than do users in the US (7.16% more). More users in the US find out about pages from other sources (8.91% more).
Prodigy users are less likely to find out about WWW pages from Usenet (20.62% less) and e-mail signatures (16.91% less) than overall users.
A smaller percentage of females find out about pages from Usenet than do males (51.83% vs. 60.61%), but they are comparable in all other categories.

The most common connection speed is 14 Kb/sec (43.76%) followed by 10 Mb/sec (13.17%) and 28 Kb/sec (12.07%).
In general, users in Europe seem to have faster connections than users in the US.
Most Prodigy users have a connection speed of 14 Kb/sec (73.28%) with another 20.09% having a connection at under 14 Kb/sec.
A higher percentage of females than males are unsure of their connection speed (20.91% vs. 6.75%).