A fair amount of interface design pertains to viewport size and/or screen resolution. That is, it’s often an issue for the user experience if a site is constructed for a viewport or screen resolution that’s bigger than whatever comes closest to standard for a given audience. Content that’s “off the screen” is ignored, missed, etc. This is true for vertical scrolling - but particularly true for left-to-right movement. Imagine our amusement, then, that there has emerged a hardware solution to a potential interface problem…in the form a mouse with vertical and horizontal scroll-wheels.

It’s an interesting angle of attack on a fundamental design problem. In the end, it won’t be a solution for poor design choices, but it’s interesting that this mouse (as well as the partial measures of the Microsoft and Logitech mice) has appeared at a time when the screen-resolution/viewport “market” is actually in its biggest state of flux in five or so years. That is, since the closest thing to a standard screen size became 800x600. Now, more and more people and sites are viewing the web at higher resolutions and building sites accordingly….but this still means that an awful lot of people are viewing the Internet in smaller windows than is optimal for many interfaces. And hence, having to scroll horitzontally a bit more. If there was doubt about that trend as described by resolution statistics, we think this piece of hardware backs it up.

JF

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 11:25 am and is filed under General.