Web Site Usability
Today at work my boss asked me if I could help him fix a problem with his screen. The first thing that came to mind was, ‘Oh no, the monitor backlight went out or the color is messed up. I’m not going to be able to fix this.’ So of course I said, “Sure, let’s take a look at it.”
As it turns out, the (presumably) high traffic news web site he was visiting was cutting off captions for photos on the right side of his internet browser. The images were in a flash file embedded in a pop-up window (more on just how annoying that is later). Obviously, this is going to be one of two issues, either the page was not designed correctly to support resolutions lower than 1024×768 (his computer was set to 800×600) or Internet Explorer 6 was handling the embed incorrectly. Now, probably most people’s first guess would be IE, of course, even I gave the web site in question the benefit of the doubt. I told my boss that maybe we could update IE or move him to Firefox if the browser turned out to be the issue.
Guess what, we were wrong…
The problem was not Internet Explorer, the problem was in the construction of the website. The images were centered with in a 1000px+ width photo gallery applet which is clearly too large for an 800 pixels wide screen resolution. To get to this gallery the user clicks on a link that has the word ‘photo’ next to it popping up a new window maximized to the monitors resolution, without any scrollbars or menus (hooray javascript!). Without scrollbars, it’s easy to see why 1000px of content is not going to work to well with 800px of visual real estate.
Now, this little story brings up a few interesting, and incredibly important points. For starters, web developers need to make sure the work they do is at least useable (notice I did not say ‘glorious’ but instead ‘usable’) at lower resolutions. In my opinion it is safe to assume the standard now is 1024×768, but enough people are still using 800×600 that you don’t want your work to be inaccessible to them. Next, it is important to make sure your work works in the most popular browsers (this means IE6 too). With new versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, browser compatibility these days can be a little disheartening.
And finally, we are back to where this all started with my boss thinking he had a problem with his monitor. As much as you may want to go on a crusade to revolutionize internet browsing, the fact is, most people have no clue what web standards are or why they are important. For a lot of people upgrading or changing browsers is just not a feasible option because to them, it is like relearning how to use something that, as far as they were concerned, worked perfectly fine before. And I agree, it is our responsibility as web developers to ensure that our clients’ work is going to work. Whatever browser, whatever resolution they are using, the consumer (user) is right and we must accommodate them.
