Designing By the Numbers...

[John Jamison]

Not long ago I was reminded by a co-worker that as we develop our online courses we need to keep in mind that the majority of our learners "out there" will be viewing our courses on an 800 x 600 resolution screen. In fact, that was recommended as a required standard for development. Out of pure curiosity, I did some quick research and found the following interesting info from the numbers-collecting group, w3counter:
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

According to their studies, here are the top ten most commonly used screen resolutions in 2009:

1 1024x768 31.68%
2 1280x800 20.16%
3 1280x1024 12.09%
4 1440x900 8.70%
5 1680x1050 5.90%
6 800x600 4.80%
7 1152x864 2.76%
8 1920x1200 2.04%
9 1280x768 1.54%
10 1366x768 1.43%

At first glance I see that the most popular resolution is 1024x768, but more than 32% of the folks are using a screen width of 1280. With a traditional 800x600, that either leaves a lot of space, or threatens to stretch things to a point that it might get kind of nasty. Overall, this suggests to me that the ole 800x600 rule may just be another one of those traditions that deserve a proper burial.

But I also realize that while these numbers represent the overall users, some of us may be dealing with audiences that may not be 'typical' of the average user. In our case for example, we have many end-users who work in agencies that have not updated their hardware for quite some time, so I'm betting our 800x600 percentages are still higher than the w3counter list suggests. I guess there's still no good replacement for spending the time to really understand your specific audience.

I'm wondering what other "rules" we apply to instructional design that might benefit from some intentional review as we approach 2010?