[Web4lib] Nielsen's Top 10 - 2005 version

[Leo Robert Klein]

Thomas Dowling wrote:
> Leo Robert Klein wrote:
> 
>>...If you think the
>>vast majority of your users have monitors set at 1600x1200 and love
>>resizing their windows to get the text right, then you'll design your
>>site with them in mind.
> 
> 
> Thanks for digging that strawman up.  The problem is not that sites are
> designing to one size and it's the wrong one.  The problem is that they
> developed bad design habits during a period of substantial homogeneity
> in user displays, and that homogeneity is breaking apart.
> 
> A couple of years ago, you could hard code your site for 800-px wide
> screens and slightly narrower windows (how many designers just started
> every page with <table width=764>?). It looked just right for your
> 800/full screen users, you could be satisfied that it was good enough
> for your 1024 users, and the remaining few percent could just deal with
> how it looked.  Just like with IE-only pages.
> 
> The current situation is not that the overall size of displays has
> grown, but that the difference has grown between the largest and
> smallest sizes your users are likely to have.  "Big" is no longer 30%
> larger than "small" - it's now 100% larger or more.  No single size is
> going to fit as many people today as 800 did a few years ago.  So you
> can either hard code to a size that annoys a growing number of your
> users, or stop coding to any particular size.
> 

If some pretty major sites are designing -- evidently -- to a standard 
screen, I'd hardly call it "digging up a strawman".  It's important 
after all to bring our deliberations back down to earth every once and a 
while.

Furthermore, I'm delighted to find out that we actually had an earlier 
simpler era where we could assume a "homogeniety" of displays.  As I 
recall, the argument against fixed-width displays back then was that 
they weren't compatible with WebTV and WAP and WML (talk about strawmen).

In any case, it's really hard for me to imagine -- in fact, it's beyond 
belief -- that sites as varied as Yahoo, Salon and Sun Microsystems are 
in the business of developing sites that annoy a "growing number" of 
their users. Gone are the days when you could launch a site based on the 
ideology of one or two developers.  So maybe they're on to something.

LEO

-- -------------
Leo Robert Klein
www.leoklein.com