Lies, Damned Lies and Analytics

Mindy McAdams gives advice about how students should test their online page designs, the trouble is the statistics she’s looking at are lying to her.

You can see that although the screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768 add up to more people (4,512 vs. 3,524), the single most common resolution in use (among people who read this blog, that is) is 1024 x 768. You can also see that the number of people viewing the site at the old standard, 800 x 600, is quite small.

Conclusion: It is sensible to design this blog to look good at a resolution of 1024 x 768, and to test it at some higher resolutions to make sure it doesn’t become unusable.

This is wrong – just because people have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 doesn’t mean they are using all of it for viewing your web page. Once you get to screens that big it’s quite common for people not to maximize the browser window, so the actual page rendering area is much smaller than the screen size would suggest. Additionally, you can’t assume that people have the stock standard browser install anymore – there are a huge number of browser toolbars that people wind up with (often preinstalled) that take up screen space, not to mention people who read the blog in a feed reader with a list of feeds down or tabs down the side.

While there might be some merit in tracking your user base and designing to the majority, you need to track the size of the actual page rendering area, not the screen resolution to get any idea about what your users will see. The best approach however is to design a site that scales well from small screens up to larger screens as gracefully as possible.

Moving on to browsers:

Conclusions: Web pages must be tested in at least three browsers: Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7. Pages for this blog should also be tested in Safari, although that may not hold true for all sites (see below).

Seriously, test in Safari – even if only the Windows version. Once you get your pages to work well in Firefox and IE 6, you’ve done 99% of the work to get it to work pretty much everywhere. While you’re there, test in Opera too. Why limit your audience when you’ve done all the hard work to get the design to work cross browser anyway? Either design for one specific browser to minimize the effort required, or design for all of them – the second browser you support is the expensive one, once you’ve got that you may as well have them all.

So how should students (and professionals) test their online page designs?

On as many browsers and platforms as they can manage. You never know what configuration your next paying client might have and you want to make sure the site looks great for them or they’ll pass you by. Numbers and statistics don’t matter – that million dollar client counts as one hit just like the millions of people you don’t care about. Don’t miss your chance by being lazy.