Screen Resolution and Page Layout

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for July 31 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html
	
Summary:
Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that
stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

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Announcing the User Experience 2006 conference

  > Seattle, October 22-28 
  > London, November 5-11 

29 full-day tutorials.

New topics include:

   Fundamental Guidelines for Application Usability
   Designing Complex Applications and Websites
   Communicating Design: User Experience Documentation
   Getting from User Data to Design
   Fundamentals of Internet Marketing: 13 Years of Lessons Learned
   Lightweight Content Management: Blogs and Wikis
   Designing Multi-User Services: Lessons from Social Psychology
   Instant Visual Communication
   Making Search Work

Full conference program:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

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Intranet Design Annual, call for participation

Think you have a good intranet? Enter it for the competition to find the
world's ten best-designed intranets.

Deadline: August 21

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2007

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Internet Explorer 7 (beta) has a great feature to magnify the text on Web
pages by as much as you want (I tried 800% and it worked). 125% is often
the most pleasant setting for browsing the many sites that insist on
displaying tiny text. This feature is four years late, but at least we
have it now. See:

   > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020819.html

Despite the new magnification feature that overrides the tyranny of frozen
fonts, the guideline remains to use relative font sizes, so that the page
will display according to each individual user's preferences instead of
requiring users to employ the magnification feature.

Yes, Firefox has had an enlargement feature for some time, but IE does one
better and increases the visibility, discoverability, and operability of
the feature by making it a one-click status menu in the lower right corner
of the screen. (I think the one-click interaction technique makes this a
non-standard widget, but this would be one of those few cases where it's
OK to deviate from the standard. Of course, don't do this at home unless
you are designing software that people are using all day long.)

Since magnification is so visible in IE 7, this may result in one of those
rare cases where a usability guideline needs to be revised. Currently, one
of the 46 guidelines for helping senior citizens is to include a
text-magnification button within the page itself if you target older
users. If IE 7 turns out to be sufficiently usable for seniors, this
guideline should be retracted. Of course, it'll be 5-7 years before enough
seniors upgrade their browsers, so for now the guideline stands. For more
on usability for older users, see

   > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020428.html

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The top hits of the Alertbox have been published as a 261-page book in
Japanese:

   > http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4903065065