UXD: User Experience Design

Resolution Past by a Majority

Elyse Sanchez, Tuesday, June 13, 2006 @ 6:50 pm

Qualified member of an elite class that includes the eternally regifted fruitcake of Christmases past, the Star Wars movie franchise, and the fervent hopes of the diehard Cubs fan for a Series sweep, the 800x600 resolution is truly one of those Things That Will Not Die.

We presume a dismissive, somewhat disparaging persona for the user with yesterday's browser:  either very young, undeveloped in either manual dexterity or a sharpened sense of aesthetics, or, god forbid, over 45, eyesight failing, faltering in the doddering twilight of the wired lifespan.  Conveniently, these two groups are usually of secondary importance--if at all--to the marketing folks targeting the high-profile general demographics.

Nevertheless, this user, who today represents barely 5 - 10% of all users (and dwindling all the time), maintains an extraordinary grip on website design even today. Our own website is currently optimized for 800x600, and I regularly design to these standards, often on projects that are likely to be of little interest to second-graders or their grandparents.

Of course, there's a catch. Designing for 800x600 in a world of 1024x768 and beyond is still a good practice. Indeed, with screen monitors achieving larger and larger footprints, a good many users have accustomed themselves to multiple, partially minimized windows, as Jennifer Kyrnin's ad hoc user research suggests.  Also, widgets and navigation add-ons can subtract signficant real estate from even a fully maximized, higher-resolution browser. Finally, as several designers have observed, if a layout doesn't work for 800x600, it probably won't improve at double the resolution.

Topics: ,

user experience design User Experience Design

Comments: 3 so far

  1. I think we can design thoughtfully using current standards to allow for almost any resolution, although I’m not testing for anything lower than 640 x 480.

    CSS allows us to express widths as a percentage of the container, which means we can make images and columns of text resize to fit almost any window, large or small. You can see some good examples of this technique at Open Source Web Design (http://www.oswd.org/), where you can also download the stylesheets and study them.

    Although there are slight variations in the way browsers interpret this, it passes all validation tests and it works well in all browsers I’ve tested. It looks good, too.

    I believe that all web browsers are moving toward full compliance with the W3C specs, and I design with that in mind. The best thing we can do to accomodate everyone is to keep the layout simple and use techniques that are well understood by any modern browser. It’s no mystery that the most stylish sites are elegantly simple and load quickly. I think it’s important for designers to understand that they are delivering content, not just design.

    Comment by Jeff, Thursday, June 15, 2006 @ 10:06 am

  2. Should’nt we design pages in such a way they can be shown in almost any resolution? Not only in different computers we have different resolutions: sometimes i want to surf in a full-screen window, sometimes i wanna have it at a smaller size. As Jeff says, that is possible with current standards.

    Comment by rodent, Friday, June 16, 2006 @ 6:50 am

  3. Yuck. Not just fixed width, but does not scale when fonts are resized. Yuck.

    Comment by Michael, Friday, July 14, 2006 @ 11:27 am

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