Introduction to Key Hardware
& Software Issues in Web Design

by Janette B. Bradley
axsWave Software, Inc.™

This article appeared in the September Issue of hc/interact, a publication of the Special Interest Group in Human Computer Interaction (SIG HCI), which is part of The American Society for Information Science. I write a regular column on Web GUI for this publication. If you are interested in joining, drop me a line and I'll send you the info.

The Web is anarchy at its best. But, anarchy has its drawbacks, particularly if you're trying to design an interface. If you are considering designing for the Web, then remember these factors:

• What hardware platform are your users on? It could be Wintel, Mac, SGI, Sun, etc. All have differences in their system color palettes and variation in their display capabilities. In addition, there are the large number of monitors and graphics cards available, with wide variations in how they display color.
• How powerful is the user's graphics capability? Should you design for 256 colors or 16.7 million colors?
• How big a monitor do your user's have? Monitors can vary in size from 14" to 21", and then there are laptops to consider. Should you design a screen that includes navigation tools that stay on the screen at all times, or ask your user to scroll back and forth to move around your site?
• Who is your user population? Are they young, old, or somewhere in between? In addition to users' tastes, which may vary by age, remember that some older users may have more trouble with small text, and may have more difficulty distinguishing subtle differences in color. These difficulties are due to physiological changes within the eye as people age.
• What is the speed of the connection users are using to access your site? Can you depend on most of your users accessing your site using T1 or T3 lines, or are you going to have users accessing your site with 14.4kb modems?
• What browser are users using to access your site? Some browsers don't even support such basics such as transparent GIFs or background pictures. When you step up to frames, tables, and HTML 3.0 tags, how your site will look to everyone who stops by can become very problematic. The solution may be to tell users that they need browser "X" to view the site. However, before you add a logo saying "Download Browser X to view", ask yourself this: How realistic is it to ask your users to spend 30 minutes or more, downloading and configuring a new browser, just to view your site?

I plan to address all of these issues in this column over the next few months, but, first, let's look at the hardware aspects that impact the Web interface. The first consideration is type of platform. Most people spend the majority of their time on one platform and don't think about how features, such as color or sound, vary from platform to platform.

For example, graphics and text on a Web page appear darker on the Wintel platform than on the Macintosh. Our firm uses the Macintosh for graphics design because it has a more fully developed design tool set than the Wintel platform. Early on, before we realized the display problem, our firm's designers produced buttons and navigational banners that were fine on the Mac, but were unreadable when viewed on the Wintel machine, because the contrast between button and button text was not sufficient. The same sort of problem arose with some buttons designed on the Wintel platform. When these buttons were displayed on the Mac, the lighter display affected the readability of the button text. If you don't have access to both platforms, one way to test readability is to view your work in grayscale. By viewing in grayscale, you can focus on the contrast, rather than the differences in color. This technique can also help with the problem of users with different graphics cards and monitors.

Right now, our firm is not large enough to have an SGI, SUN, or RS6000, so I can't report on variations in their capabilities. I would be interested in hearing about any experiences you might have had with these and other platforms.

To deal with some of the problems caused by different hardware:

• Define your audience. If you are creating a site to distribute Mac software, you probably don't have to worry too much about other platforms. On the other hand, if you are designing a site for a retail jeweler or a public library, you need to test your site on multiple platforms.
• Maintain a high degree of contrast. Ensure that you don't allow the readability of the navigational features to be overwhelmed by the aesthetics of the graphic design.
• Test your design on different platforms, with different users, and include users who are over 45.

Feel free to contact me with questions or to talk about how the axsWave Software team can help you with your Web site:

Janette B. Bradley (janette@metronet.com)