This is another “what-if” type of post.

Monitors, in general, are getting bigger, and screen resolution is getting higher. (For example, the monitor I’m writing this on right now is 1920×1200 pixels.) The 800×600 screen is largely a thing of the past, relegated to technophobes and poor school districts — the rest of us seem to have readily moved on.

If monitors keep getting bigger, what new design challenges might that bring? Instead of struggling to cram too much functionality into too little space, might interface designers start facing the opposite problem, of being able to expose all of the functionality when maybe they shouldn’t? I could imagine it becoming a larger effort to direct and manage the user’s attention appropriately.

Let’s take an extreme example. What if monitors that were 3 feet diagonal became commonplace?

I’m willing to bet that full screen mode would become something very different. Even on my 24-inch monitor, I almost never use an application full-screen; it becomes too big of an area to look at. If I expand a website, it becomes hard to read. Instead, I use the extra space to layer auxiliary programs and windows (iTunes, AIM, the Dock, tool palettes, etc.) so that they are available without any extra effort.

I could imagine a program that really needs your focus having to dim or blank out other parts of the screen. Would full screen mode then mean that only part of the monitor gets used, only as much as we can take in at one glance?

Or maybe single screens start taking on some of the capabilities that multiple monitors have now. Maybe you get the ability to define different areas of the screen and assign different programs to them, the way people have email on one screen and do work in the other. So the monitor stops being a unified space and starts to become a segmented group of areas - like multiple desktops on Linux, but simultaneously present.

Of course, that gets into a whole different windowing system. Could you expand and collapse different spaces? How would you arrange them?

Alright, my brain’s starting to hurt. And even with all that, I still wonder about the effect on people’s attention. In order to combat information overload, I’ll bet programs will have to find a way to say, “Pay attention to me, and not anything else,” when the users need them to. In fact, that could become the biggest challenge of all.