Re: [Usability] Gome is Too BIG..

["Matthew Nuzum" <newz bearfruit org>]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
>  When we first wrote the HIG, the most common screen sizes in use were
>  (based on the various browser statistics available online) 800x600 and
>  1024x768, in roughly equal amounts.  I don't believe we had any
>  resolution (dpi) statistics available. (I can't find any online now,
>  either.)

I am the webmaster for Ubuntu.com and many of the other Canonical
websites. I have access to browser statistics for our websites'
visitors. We don't share actual numbers of visitors but I have
permission to share ratios of screen resolutions of people coming to
our site. This report includes many millions of visitors over the last
30 days. For brevity I've only included the top 100 screen
resolutions. Those excluded from the list comprise less than 0.01% for
a given screen resolution.

The nice thing about the ubuntu.com website is that it attracts all
kinds of users. While the forums and wiki tend to attract mostly
Ubuntu/Linux users the main website gets a very good mix.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~mnuzum/screenres.csv

>  While doing a simple mathematical scale up/down might be an interim
>  solution, it's not really the way to produce apps that look their best
>  on a smaller or larger screen.  I'm sure a visual designer would tell
>  you that certain elements should be scaled by more than others, and
>  some shouldn't be scaled at all.

I think this can be defined, but first:

>  And when you bring touchscreens into the equation, they have different
>  UI requirements altogether, in terms of minimum widget size and inter-
>  widget spacing.  This is why the common toolkits like Windows/MFC and
>  Java/Swing tend to have completely separate UI guidelines for mobile
>  devices, and I'm sure they've done a lot more thinking about it than
>  we have, so far.

I personally don't see a way around this. As a large screen high-dpi
user I'm going to want my panels to be bigger, the spacing between
buttons to be larger and the fonts to be bigger.

As a small screen high-dpi user I'm going to want the text more
readable, the buttons clickable but probably not waste space on
padding. (just a guess though)

For traditional desktop users using a unit of measurement that's based
on font-size might be helpful (similar to the em's used on the web).
That way if a user has a problem with an interface using a standard
9pt font they can increase it to 12pt and everything should scale
appropriately.

There are some problems with using EM's though, since it deals with
the width of the letter M. Sometimes things grow larger than you think
they should because of a surplus of thin letters. Someone more
familiar with typography would have to chime in to suggest a better
unit of measurement.

By the way, I have to keep re-editing my text to be more clear... the
term "high resolution" is very ambiguous. It could mean "a lot of
pixels" or "a high dpi." I think that a lot of problems revolve around
the growing availability of high dpi screens, regardless of
resolution. I could be wrong though.

To add another little bit of discussion material, there are probably
two users who have high dpi screens. There is the technical user who
wants more screen space. They want to see more. Then there are a lot
of users who are simply sold a higher DPI screen because "bigger is
better" and a "high res" screen *must* be better than a dorky low-res
screen, right? (what, your screen isn't HD?) Check out Dell's website
and you'll see what I mean... it's clearly being sold as a suggested
upgrade.

The user who wants more screen space will complain if we take away
their extra pixels by using larger buttons and fonts. The user who
just wants "higher res," whatever that means, currently gets a
hard-to-use desktop experience that takes a lot of fiddling to
overcome.

We've done a lot of talk, is there any action that can be taken?

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode