Responding to Your Users
This post was made Mar 03, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
It has been 8 days since we announced the book and this site and already there is an emerging trend in our users: wide screens.
Initially the site was built around 1024 pixel and 800 pixel wide displays. Based on the general computer population that is a safe bet. At those screen resolutions the design works well.
800 x 600 pixels
A small amount of blue on the left the content makes up most of the screen. We did break one common convention by putting the content on the right, but at this size it is not really apparent.
1024 by 768 pixels
As you can see at the wider resolution about 50/50 content and image.
1440 by 900 pixels
By this point around 1/3 of the design is text, the rest is image and the right alignment is obvious. I can’t even replicate the largest resolution that has visited our site. But, at 2560 pixels wide I doubt that they are ever using the whole screen for a single program.
One of the first e-mail we got was: why is your site text on the right?
To be on the web you have to design a site. It isn’t going to be perfect– at first it will just be. The value of analytics is show how people ARE using your site. Good design is not always going to employ every convention. Some conventions are more important than others, and some are purely contextual. And sometimes you just get something unexpected.
We didn’t expect to have such large screens, but we definitely know how to respond to this information. The next step is to look at some of our other indicators so our next design fulfills other apparent trends in our users and then set the indicators that we will use to determine the success of version two of the site.
It is all good once I re-size my browser.
It is interesting that the most vocal responses about the site is something that the user can actually take control of.
I am intrigued to see how the situation changes as time passes. Particularly since one of our top 10 is obviously a cell phone.