- ninky
There are some nasty old computers in the basement of the mu that I see being used ALL DAY LONG by the students. I hate to design to the lowest common denominator, but seriously, they are in the heart of student life and on all the time, going through core pages.
It's hard to look ahead while these kind of things get you stuck in the past. How do we deal with that?
I completely understand your frustration, and it seems like this is a two-part issue: 1) does old, remaining hardware dictate (and limit) the way we design the ASU web, and 2) do we attack this from a design perspective, or is it our responsibility to ensure that the "high-traffic" monitors are sufficiently large and modern?
My first instinct would be to throw a little bit of money at the problem, considering (among other factors) that the Tech fee was just approved. If the fee is instituted with the aim of "improving" the student computing experience at ASU", I don't see how buying better monitors for the MU basement could be more in line with this objective. The only question is: Who decides how the Tech fee is distributed?
However, any responsible discussion of web design standards should address the less desirable contingency - namely, that the old monitors stay and that we're forced to design "around" them. It's one thing to design for the new standard of 1024px widths (a few of us in the asu.edu group have standardized to 960px wide layouts) and "force" those with lesser hardware to upgrade, but it's much tougher to do so when the organization for which you design is responsible for providing the inferior screens. I think that disregarding the current MU hardware in future designs would simply make for a distasteful user experience, regardless of what we deem "best practices".
My advice would be to keep designing for *sigh* the lowest common denominator (800x600, IE 6, etc) until we can get some sort of statistic showing that old hardware is unquestionably in the minority on campus. Many private firms the size of ASU are still designing web pages for browsers that run on primitive machines because their research shows that 7% of their client base is still seeing the web through old hardware. As "undesign" as this sounds, it's my belief that providing the best user experience starts with functionality and that an attractive interface comes in (a close) second. Yes, we're moving into a time when the average machine has a 1024x768 capable monitor and a sufficiently powerful graphics card to display accurate colors, but we're not quite there yet.
I realize that I've probably raised more questions than answers in this comment, but I hope we can continue to discuss this further. Nina, this is a great topic and I'm glad you posted it. This is exactly what the Web Community was built to do - help solve problems and spark discussions among anyone who works on the web at ASU. To follow up, does anyone know what the specs on those MU screens are? What is the worst aspect? The small size/resolution, the colors, the processors?
Christopher Puleo, University Technology Office, asu.edu Web Services
You weren't kidding, Nina. I took a tour of the computers in the MU basement today and they're atrocious - tiny, old CRT screens with terrible resolution and a propietary browser that looks like something you'd use to take a learner's permit test at the MVD. In my opinion, there's no excuse for such terrible hardware to be located in that kiosk in the lounge. I noticed there was one student using a computer, and she seemed to be scowling at the unfriendly interface.
The kiosk contains a scant 4 systems. It can't be that expensive for us to upgrade this hardware. I can only guess that these systems are in place because they're running some sort of propietary software that restricts what you can do on them (kind of like retail registers). Technically, since the MU isn't a computing site, I suppose it's unreasonable to station a tech support supervisor there to monitor student usage activity and respond to user support requests. So, they slapped that awful software on and called it a day. There's really no way to "break" the machine if you can only use its one, limited browser.
But getting back to your point - after browsing a few ASU core pages, I agree, the rendering is terrible. The ASU home page came up green in some places and the photos were beyond pixelated. It looked like someone had applied a "craquelure" filter to them in Photoshop. I think the user experience on these machines goes beyond "distasteful" and into "inhibiting" and "misrepresenting". We should lobby to have them replaced ASAP.
Christopher Puleo
University Technology Office
asu.edu Web Services
They make ugly fast. and the mouse never works, too. I'm wondering if they are a MU budget thing rather than a UTO budget. They only take websafe, making tans turn green and gold turn crazy bright. We have pictures somewhere. I'm not worried so much about the size, that's something we can adapt to without losing a lot. It's the quality of the rendering.
So, when does one to one take over the world? Then perhaps these machines would not be so useful to students if they had their own.
It's not just old monitors. My iPAQ is fairly new but its display is small (~320x240). Also, don't forget screen readers, cell phones, etc.  There are lots of great articles on the web about building fluid web pages, WAP pages, etc. And there are frameworks like ASP.NET which allow you to code once then deploy for multiple target platforms -- a big time saver!
cheers,
Cameron