Size matters (again!)

Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.

What you notice first of all is just how small this lovely little gadget is, about half the size of a regular “small” laptop and weighing in at less than a kilo in weight it really is of lilliputian dimensions, note my fat fingers and a Roger banister commemorative 50p for
scale.

So, now to the point of this post. Other than winning the ongoing “Who’s got the smallest laptop” competition hands down what does the advent of this device and it’s inevitable copyists mean for us in the web design community? Well, primarily it has made us think
twice about how we cater for users of reduced pixel capacity. The screen on the eeePC is only 7 inches diagonal, with a screen resolution of 800×450 pixels – THAT’S TINY!

Conventional wisdom has long forecast the death of 800×600 in favour of 1024×768 as the de facto standard screen resolution, with many users running at considerably higher resolutions of 1600 pixels and beyond. Now, as conscientious web developers we still consider the needs of users with what has previously been regarded as older technology, but as the 15” CRT fades away like a bad memory it’s now the turn of the latest tech to be
challenged in the pixel department.

As a company we already cater for mobile users with stylesheets specifically designed for quick download speeds and minute 3.5/4” screens; but the eeePC isn’t a mobile device in the true sense, it’s an ultra portable laptop. So when I visit a website I should see what I
see on my regular desktop, right? Well, no. A lot of sites designed for 1024×768 resolutions with fixed widths of 950px and up means that there’s a fair amount of horizontal
scrolling going on.

So what to do? Well the smart money is on adaptive designs. Savvy sites like the fantastic UX magazine http://uxmag.com and even our own KBH http://www.kbhtransportmedia.co.uk use
javascript to swap stylesheets depending on the user’s resolution. This type of seamless provision based on a particular users needs really embodies the type of user centred design that we should all be aiming for.