584 Pixels

July 10th, 2008 seph250 Posted in Design |

I’ve been doing a lot of user interface design lately, and Sam Decker pointed me to a great presentation on Web 2.0 Product Management by Dan Olsen.  There is a section in the slide show on UI design that is definitely worth taking a look at.  One of the points that I found really useful is this:

When most people are casually internet browsing, they don’t scroll down to see what else is on the page, just below their initial field of view.

Thus, if there’s any critical content “below the fold”, it’s likely your users won’t find it.  Confusion and frustration will set in, and they’ll end up on your competitors site.

Now, to get technical: according to the presentation, 92% of the population has a screen height of 768 pixels or greater, while only 38% of the population has a screen height of 772 pixels or greater.  I’m not sure where the information comes from, and how recent it is, but this does serve as a pretty convincing argument to optimize your site for a 768 pixel screen height (or at least make sure it provides a great experience at this resolution).

In my Firefox 3 browser, with two toolbars shown, and multiple windows open, a 768 pixel screen height leaves about 584 pixels of web page height viewable in the browser without scrolling down.  Basically - it’s not much.  Fitting all critical content into this 584 pixels puts a lot of pressure on a UI designer to be as efficient as possible, but ultimately shuld pay off with more satisfied users and a higher conversion to sales rate.