Minimal

The fallacy of fluid layouts and usability

I made the mistake of looking on Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com site the other day. Having avoided it for about a year, I was reeled in by his Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines rant. It didn’t take long for me to find something that wound me up. In fact, it was his second most frequently violated guideline:

Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
<snip>
Fighting frozen layouts seems a lost battle, but it’s worth repeating: different users have different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. You can’t assume that everyone’s window width is 800 pixels: it’s too much for some users and too little for others.

So, what’s wrong with his argument? After all, people do have different screen resolutions. And yes, people with big monitors can resize their browsers. Well, conversely, can’t people with small monitors scroll their browsers? Granted, it’s not great usability if you have to scroll horizontally — in fact, it sucks — but it is possible and the vast majority of people won’t need to scroll. There are even measures you can take to minimise the scrolling, such as putting primary content at the left. Overall, it’s a rare occasion when an 800x600 layout badly affects the usability of a site. Nielsen appears reluctant to acknowledge any of this.

More importantly, he also ignores the usability hit you’re taking when you impose a fluid layout on your user. First, instead of being presented with paragraphs whose widths have been optimised for ease of reading, the user has to go to the bother of resizing their window to improve matters. People have got better things to do with their lives than resize browser windows; things like... oooh... reading your site, for instance.

Second, it’s not even as if resizing a window is a simple task. Resizing by the keyboard is so awkward it’s not worth considering. Resizing using the mouse is a pain too, as the resizing widget is pretty small in most GUIs, so you’ve got the much-quoted Fitts’ Law working against you. And remember, users can’t control the mouse very well. All in all, window management such as this is something we should strive to minimise (ho ho!), not impose on the user. If your content can be optimised using a static layout and only a small fraction of your audience will see scrollbars, I say go for it. I know I’d appreciate it.

Right, rant over.