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.

I just noticed something interesting.

I’ve been reading some research lately about how those typical popup messages don’t really work all that well, because many people click confirm without reading the message. But Firefox does something interesting, at least in one dialog: it has a time-delay of about 5 seconds before the Save button becomes enabled.

In the Firefox extensions dialog, the button includes a timer that counts down from 5 to 1, after which it becomes enabled. When I saw the timer and noticed that it was at 3, I then looked up at the top of the dialog box, probably to figure out a cause of the delay. This reminded me of the application that I was installing, and caused me to at least briefly skim over the text. Not that I could recite the dialog or anything, but without the timeout I probably wouldn’t have even looked up there at all.

I wonder about the usefulness of this technique to other dialogs where you really want to make the user read the message. Making it so that they can’t automatically and thoughtlessly hit “Yes” is probably a good idea. On the other hand, you have to balance this against annoyance, by not making the delay too long.

Still, it seems like a neat idea, and one I haven’t noticed anywhere else.

Recently I was having a conversation with my mother that got me thinking again about cars. She mentioned that she and Dad are thinking about getting a bigger vehicle, like a small pickup truck, because they’ve both started to have trouble getting in and out of small cars.

This led me to wonder if, given the current aging trend and people’s tendency to stay healthy and driving longer, there might not be a developing market for vehicles that are specifically tailored for older folks.

For example, as mentioned above, many older people have trouble getting into and out of small cars, and prefer vehicles that sit high off the road. However, too often the only alternative for a higher vehicle is a huge, inefficient gas-guzzler. I wonder if we might not see a growth in vehicles that are designed to sit high off the road, but are still relatively light and fuel-efficient.

Since many older folks have a fixed income, the reduction in fuel costs could be very beneficial. (And of course, it would also help reduce carbon emissions.)

Another possibility is that we could see options and add-on packages specifically dealing with accessibility.

For example, just as you have large-print books for to folks with poorer vision, maybe you could have a dash with larger numbers and simplified displays. That would be an interesting problem in information design, figuring out how to fit the necessary information, while making it as readable as possible. Maybe some information, like RPM, gets moved to somewhere else, and the key information like speed and fuel is made much larger in the display. And maybe there are added notifications if, for example, you exceed a certain speed.

Additionally, many seniors have trouble with fine motor control. What if you could upgrade your car to have larger, easy to grasp dials for the stereo and climate controls? Again, this may require the rearrangement or removal of less-important buttons and features, but in the case of many seniors that might be worthwhile for greater ease of use.

Many of these changes would not only improve the driving experience for seniors, they would also make the road safer in general, by decreasing the potential for distraction, such as fumbling with small buttons to change the radio, or increasing the rate of access to key data, such as fuel levels and speed. And with increasing numbers of seniors on the road, that could only benefit everyone.

BTW, I hope to start posting more regularly again. (Of course, that’s always easier said than done.) Coming soon: some thoughts about larger computer screens and how they change the use of full-screen mode. Also, happy New Year!