Designing for the New Resolution II
Now I’ve finally installed my new 22 inch widescreen Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor and installed the new graphics card (plus an extra gig of RAM) its interesting to note the further complexity of what I was driving at in Designing for the New Resolution.
Using the large LCD monitor with a resolution of 1680 x 1050 affords a vastly different experience than would be expected by jumping from 1024 x 768 up to 1280 x 1024 on an old 17 inch Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. On the CRT the text becomes extremely tiny on websites while on the LCD the same sites are displayed with some affordance of real world user experience. By that I mean they maintain their perspective quite well and remain relatively true to the original design.
The tiny text issue I mentioned in Designing for the New Resolution aims directly at those moving up to 1280 x 1024 on CRT technologies. Or rather, the contradiction between that paradigm and the LCD one. Why? Because it enforces that we don’t have control over the user’s technologies or experience of our design.
The thing to take away from this post is that resolution statistics don’t afford the full picture of user experience – different screen technologies as well as personal preference of windowing over full screen browsing. It was through watching my students interact with 1280 x 1024 CRT displays that caused me to think a bit about how to remain accessible for all groups including theirs.
