[Sigia-l] length of nav labels

[Jared M. Spool]

At 05:16 PM 8/10/2005, Terrence Wood wrote:

> > In other words, denser pages tend to do better. It's an artifact of the
> > limited space in a browser window and the demands of information research.
>
>This is one to watch as screen sizes increase, what may be true for 640 - 
>800 displays may not stand up well at 1028 or bigger. Think hicks law - 
>the more complex a system is, the longer it takes to use.

At first blush, we're not seeing any change. We think it's for because, 
while the resolution is much bigger, it's still way smaller than that of print.

A 1024x768 screen still comes in somewhere around 72 dpi. A newspaper rings 
in at 2400dpi. In a standard paper, you get a lot more resolution to play 
with.

Now, think about the three most popular papers in the US: New York Times, 
Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. How much whitespace do you find on 
their front pages? Even USA Today, which is probably the least information 
dense of the three, is still pretty dense. People *want* a lot of 
information at their fingertips.

So, a newspaper is a very dense page with extremely high resolution. We're 
no way near that with our current screen technology.

That's why we haven't seen much change in the behavior of dense screens.

Jared


Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

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