[Sigia-l] width limits for a body of text

[Madhu Menon]

At 06:33 AM 21-11-02, Listera wrote:
>I'd love to see a survey that conclusively shows "most users have customized
>their environments" especially to the degree you're referring to.

I concur.

You US folks are lucky in that you actually use monitors capable of 
resolutions like 1280*1024. Here in India, a 15" monitor is still 
"standard" (though 17" may become more widespread in a year or two) and 
800*600 is still the typical resolution.

Everyone here pretty much runs a maximised window.

I used to do sysadmin work (and hence tech support) a long time ago, and I 
found that very few people changed the default resolution. If the machine 
came set up as 640*480, that's how they left it. I was the one who went 
around telling them they could improve on that.

My view is that while users should be able to change things like font size, 
a designer's job is to use his or her design knowledge and experience to 
make intelligent choices that will work well for a majority of the site's 
target audience. Design IS an important part of the user experience, and we 
*are* influenced by the visual and aesthetic appeal of sites. The problem 
is that while users (readers?) will be put off by bad design, that doesn't 
necessarily mean they'll also possess the design knowledge to rectify any 
bad design decisions.

Take leading, for instance. While the text on a page may appear crowded to 
a reader (something it may just be a "something's not right" feeling), they 
probably won't figure out that increasing the leading (line height in CSS) 
will improve the readability. Similarly, while a colour scheme with poor 
contrast may look weird, readers may not be equipped to decide the ideal 
colour scheme.

Who *does* have that knowledge? Why, a good designer, of course. That's 
what you pay him or her for.

(Pedant's note: DPI is a print publishing term. For monitors, it's PPI - 
Points Per Inch.)

Regards,

Madhu

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Madhu Menon
Internet User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net   |   Yahoo messenger: cold_logic

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