Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Page 78 of 129

When I get too wide, they call me fat, not improving

Grant Barrett nails it in his assessment of the New York Times’s redesign, in which one major decision was to bust the screen width to 1000 pixels: “Hey, who said we read (or want to read) ANY web site with the browser window filling the whole screen? The only people I know who do that are n00b Windows users.”

Mind you, the Times is simply keeping up with the joneses. Many of its peers, from the Washington Post to the forward-thinking and usability-centric Cnet to the wise folks at The Economist, have expanded their screen sizes, largely to capitalize on ad revenue and space above the fold. (Full disclosure: I commended The Economist on its redesign in this space last fall, albeit with the same point I’m about to make.)

But I’m with Grant on this one. Thanks to years of Mac use, my browser windows are never set to full-size, even when I’m on Windows. Reading studies for years have said 450 pixels is the maximum optimal width for reading text, even if some people train themselves to do otherwise. Most importantly, between 25 and 30 percent of Internet users are still on 800×600 monitors, a significant audience segment.

Yet the push for real estate nudges design ever wider, regardless of the consequences—and, perhaps, the realization that a quarter of the viewing audience won’t even see the right-hand side of the screen.

My department at work just finished an audit of two dozen ecommerce websites in our competitive space. Of them, 23 had fixed-width designs between 700 and 800 pixels. The one with full-screen capability stretched its header and footer without altering the content-and-commerce area. Clearly, the optimal usability level is not yet at 1024 pixels in width.

Colleagues at magazine websites have told me their wide-screen ad space performs well, so I won’t argue against it. But I won’t argue for it, either.

Pillow talk

“Who sings ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’?”

“The Scorpions.”

Pause.

“Does a hurricane really rock you?”

Tip of the day

If you’re a middle-aged man who loves dogs, and your way of expressing that love is to blow kisses at a cute dog who walks past you, whatever you do, please don’t make eye contact with the dog’s owner while blowing said kisses.

Satellite radio

I have XM Radio in my office at work, which is a delightful place to have a satellite radio signal. At home: great idea, not all that much use. At work? All day, every day. Jazz in the morning, singer-songwriter stuff over lunch, harder music in the afternoon (or when no one’s looking) and the occasional diversion when the mood strikes.

Lately I’ve been keeping an eye on the display in the hopes of discovering new music. I’m learning as I go, too, combining my ears and my memory, things like

Henry Thomas, “Bull Doze Blues” = Canned Heat, “Goin’ up the Country”

and so on.

The diversity is great. I’ve been listening to nothing but blues for the past two days. I have found that Starbucks, which programs the Hear Music channel, really does know a thing or two about quality background noise.

But most of all, I’m starting to rekindle my passion for music. I spent a long while battling my ears (which is well chronicled elsewhere on this site, and which is rearing its ugly head again, but that’s a story for another time), and its aggravations—no more live shows, no more loud radios, and for a while everything sounded funny—dampened my interest in listening to anything. But with a diverse and multiplicitous feed, and some decent speakers to go with it, music has re-entered my life, and my entire day is better.

What I’m also noticing is the newly transitive quality of my music awareness. Time was, I’d hunt down music, with the passion of a true collector. Now, I’m becoming happy to just tune into a station that suits my mood, and leave it at that. I’m not buying as many albums or learning as many band names. That has me a little sad, though, and it’s why I’ve been peeking at the radio’s display more often. It’s one thing to love music, but regaining the passion will be another level entirely. I hope I get there.

Market pricing

Frank Bruni, having visited new restaurant Butterfield 8 in its opening days, asks: “Like other new restaurants, Butterfield 8 was charging anyone who came through the door full price. And if a restaurant is going to do that, shouldn’t it take full responsibility for the quality of the experience it provides? Shouldn’t it be ready to roll?”

Yes and no. The same could be asked of Broadway shows in previews, and the first year a new car or computer is on the market. They all charge what the market will bear—in Bruni’s case, retail price less $10 after mistakes were made.

And indeed, theaters in preview often serve up discounts to entice people to fill the seats. But a hot ticket is more than willing to charge full price, because people are willing to pay it. The same goes for new restaurants with buzz: 5 Ninth and Butterfield 8 (obviously the hip trend is to throw a number into the restaurant name) have full reservations and busy dining rooms, so they happily operate in dress rehearsal mode, right down to the cost.

Bruni should be impressed with the out-of-the-box apparent success of the new restaurants, and pleased that his industry’s consumers are willing to support such endeavors. In an expensive new launch, full pricing early helps defray costs and encourages profitability. More power to them.

The slow adoption

It Rings, Sings, Downloads, Uploads. But Can You Stand It?, in The New York Times, starts with an anecdote that describes me perfectly: “You would think that he’d be wildly enthusiastic about the new third-generation, or 3G, cellphones that play video and music. But instead, he seems less than impressed—a reaction that could spell trouble for Sprint, Verizon Wireless and other providers that have spent billions of dollars upgrading their networks to lure customers to their high-speed 3G systems.”

Indeed. I was invited to the Sprint Power Vision Ambassador Program not long ago (see Consumerist‘s offer and reaction). Sprint delivered to me a shiny new Samsung multimedia phone with full access privileges and six months of unlimited usage, free of charge. I found it exciting to be a part of a beta program, and intriguing to be an ambassador, a chance for me to play BzzAgent from the inside.

Instead, I’ve turned out much like the article describes. The phone, while robust, is difficult to navigate. The features, while included, require my activating a subscription, making me skeptical of fees and reluctant to say yes to anything. And while I do want a new phone, I have hardly used my free ambassador toy, since my old phone does what I want it to do (make calls, send text messages and take the occasional photo) just fine. The Times is right: convincing ordinary phone service subscribers to bump their services is going to be an uphill battle.

Interestingly, the ambassador program has left me feeling like a bit of a heel. I was handed a cell phone with the works, free, in exchange for discussing it on my blog, and this is the first it’s come up. I hope to figure out Verizon’s call forwarding so I can turn the Sprint phone into my primary for a while. But then there’s a phone book to migrate, and that 816 number they gave me, and I’m not sure if and when I’ll ever use the streaming video….

In short

Because it’s been awhile:

~ How are you? Me, I’m ready to diet and exercise more regularly. I hope to go to yoga (yoga! for the second time!) tonight.

~ Somehow I made it through the past two weeks without posting about the weather. The latter half of January was way too warm for my tastes. What will July bring?

~ Remind me to tell you sometime about my jinxed Hawaii vacation.

~ One of the few consistent joys in life is owning a dog. (You know, this guy.)

~ Go Steelers!

“Love Monkey”

OK, so I liked the TV show “Ed” when it was on, which predisposes me to enjoying Tom Cavanagh. And I’m in my 30s. And I live in New York City. And I love music. Obviously, that means I should like Love Monkey, Cavanagh’s new show about all of the above. And I absolutely do like it: from the obvious but enjoyable boy-girl interplay to the four-friends underpinnings to the theme of having and pursuing a passion (and also to Cavanagh’s trademark rambling soliloquies, which seem to have rubbed off on me). I don’t know that it has the broad appeal to become a mainstay of CBS’s otherwise bread-and-butter lineup, but I sure hope it does. I may even discover some good new music while I’m at it.

As if the show weren’t appealing enough, its theme song is “Someone Who’s Cool,” one of the better tracks by the Odds, a little-known Beatlesque power-pop band from Canada that I have come to adore over the years. Having one’s song become a TV theme is hardly the road to fame—ask The Rembrandts, Mach Five and countless others—but the recognition is fun.

Also fun is that three of the four main characters of “Ed” have returned to substantial television roles this season. Ah, Stuckey Bowl, we hardly knew you.

Economics

My favorite new Internet read is economists’ blogs. Short-term, off-the-cuff analysis of current events and trends by people whose discipline is to do just that. Often, economics articles come in conjunction with other editorial features; economist blogs give me lots of present-tense economic theory without waiting for a particular contextual frame.

Some of the blogs I’m reading:

The Big Picture

Freakonomics

The Sports Economist (particularly entertaining)

Marginal Revolution

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