English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

So far I have been doing research on the usability of Opera and some of its convenient features. Since our audience is an IT department, any feature that will help save time or keep data/information organized is helpful. The main feature that stands out about Opera is the “Speed Dial”, where you can have nine “buttons” as your home page. This allows the user to access frequently used pages very fast. This would be great for an IT person that uses a lot of web based network utilities. I think this could be incorporated into the white paper as a feature that saves time and compare it to the other browsers bookmarks.

Opera also has a feature called “Wand”. This allows for a master password to be used on top of all other saved browser passwords. This could be helpful for an IT person when there are a large amount separate passwords, one master password could be used. All the separate passwords would still keep each individual web utility secure, but would be easily accessed by the admin. This would be used in the main part of the whitepaper, since it’s a key function that could separate this browser (Opera) from the others.

The third feature that stood out based on my research thus far is the ability to open closed tabs. This is a very nice feature which would alleviate the problem of accidentally closing a tab. An IT person could be dealing with pages that he or her cannot afford to close, so being able to open them back up would be very useful, good safety precaution.