Lies, Damned Lies and Analytics
Mindy McAdams gives advice about how students should test their online page designs, the trouble is the statistics she's looking at are lying to her.
You can see that although the screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768 add up to more people (4,512 vs. 3,524), the single most common resolution in use (among people who read this blog, that is) is 1024 x 768. You can also see that the number of people viewing the site at the old standard, 800 x 600, is quite small.
Conclusion: It is sensible to design this blog to look good at a resolution of 1024 x 768, and to test it at some higher resolutions to make sure it doesn’t become unusable.
This is wrong – just because people have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 doesn't mean they are using all of it for viewing your web page. Once you get to screens that big it's quite common for people not to maximize the browser window, so the actual page rendering area is much smaller than the screen size would suggest. Additionally, you can't assume that people have the stock standard browser install anymore – there are a huge number of browser toolbars that people wind up with (often preinstalled) that take up screen space, not to mention people who read the blog in a feed reader with a list of feeds down or tabs down the side.
While there might be some merit in tracking your user base and designing to the majority, you need to track the size of the actual page rendering area, not the screen resolution to get any idea about what your users will see. The best approach however is to design a site that scales well from small screens up to larger screens as gracefully as possible.
Moving on to browsers:
Conclusions: Web pages must be tested in at least three browsers: Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7. Pages for this blog should also be tested in Safari, although that may not hold true for all sites (see below).
Seriously, test in Safari – even if only the Windows version. Once you get your pages to work well in Firefox and IE 6, you've done 99% of the work to get it to work pretty much everywhere. While you're there, test in Opera too. Why limit your audience when you've done all the hard work to get the design to work cross browser anyway? Either design for one specific browser to minimize the effort required, or design for all of them – the second browser you support is the expensive one, once you've got that you may as well have them all.
So how should students (and professionals) test their online page designs?
On as many browsers and platforms as they can manage. You never know what configuration your next paying client might have and you want to make sure the site looks great for them or they'll pass you by. Numbers and statistics don't matter – that million dollar client counts as one hit just like the millions of people you don't care about. Don't miss your chance by being lazy.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I completely agree with you. Mindy’s got it all (well, almost) wrong. And don’t forget the bunch of poeple sitting behind corporate proxy servers that filters away JavaScript, effectively rendering them as “invisible” visitors, at least for the screen-size statistics. And then you have the small bunch of people that use a console-based browser or don’t render the page visually at all. You better make sure your site is accessible to these too.
September 4th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
You’re right about the size of the browser window, of course — few if any people with greater than 1024 x 768 ever maximize the browser window. (I never maximize it on my MacBook Pro at 1440.) The benefit to using 1024 x 768 (or more realistically, 1000 x 550) as a standard is that you will accommodate the majority of the people using the higher resolutions. I see far too many Web sites (especially from beginning Web designers) with a height much too great to be viewed at 1024.
So first and foremost, I was trying to give those people a benchmark they can use. Obviously they look at sites using a different browser window size, and they are ignorant about how to accommodate the audience.
You might stop to think that it’s not possible to test in Safari on a Windows platform when you had to fight tooth and nail to get the school’s IT department to install Firefox in addition to IE, when the IT department wants everything to come from Microsoft. I’m also arguing with students who can’t seem to muster up the energy to test in both IE 6 and IE 7.
Your advice is good, but maybe you’re not accustomed to dealing with the students (and in some cases, newspaper Web designers) I am urging toward better practices. For them, their idea of testing is looking at it on their own single screen, in a single browser.
I actually had a woman tell me about a month ago — “No one uses Macs.” (Not one of my students, thank heaven.)
September 5th, 2007 at 6:49 am
Mindy,
Believe me I understand the challenges of teaching students and dealing with IT departments – my family is full of teachers and I’ve spent a fair bit of time working in schools myself to help them with technology. That really doesn’t excuse teaching them bad habits though. You need to consistently teach good practices and make sure the assessment criteria reflect that. IT departments are usually surprisingly flexible when you can show that they’re inhibiting the student’s educational outcomes but I understand the frustration, it does take a lot of showing.
There’s a whole other rant to have about schools being short-sighted and standardizing on a single platform. I know it’s easier from a system administration perspective but it completely fails to teach students the real skills they need to adapt to the software that they will use when they graduate – that software doesn’t exist today.
Anyway, I understand where you’re coming from, but don’t settle – stick to best practices and always teach the right way instead of encouraging compromise.