In article <20050404125730.M7937@crystalclearsoftware.com>, "Jeff Garland" <jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com> wrote:
You are basically saying that we should sacrifice readability for the majority of users who will come to the site and not even be aware of the fact that the reason that the web site is hard to read is that their window is wide. I don't think that's the right tradeoff here.
The assertion that the site is hard to read for the 'majority of users' really isn't backed up by any facts. You're assumming everyone has a wide display, small font sizes, etc. Not everyone does. I say the site is perferctly readable and that a non-fixed design allows users easy control the parameters.
It's backed by my understanding of the issues involved in designing for readability, which I continue to think should be more important than spatial efficiency. Your assertion that the site is perfectly readable at arbitrary widths disagrees with what I believe is credible research on this topic. I don't have the time right now to look for references, but <http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/textmargin.html> is a good start. The salient quotes from it are: "Results indicated that, by itself, text width does not influence readability; however, there was a significant interaction between text width and margin width. The most efficiently read conditions were those with small text width (4-inch) and large margins, or the largest text width (8-inch) and no border." and "The lack of correlation indicates that preference does not necessarily lead to optimal processing. Some efficiently-processed conditions are liked by participants while others are not. "
I guess we'll have to do a survey...
A survey is not necessarily relevant, unless you are willing to (IMO wrongly) assume that preference for a layout is correlated to its adequacy. HCI studies find time and time again that people don't know what's good for them. meeroh