Here’s the tl;dr version of this post: I am redoing all my personal materials to be something much more deliberate and efficient. Starting with this website. Everything will be new.

I’ve learned some things recently. Partially from poking around the internet looking at other UX designer’s sites, and also from having to sift through some resumes for UX designers here at my place of employment.

See, I’ve learned 2 things.

1. People usually don’t build their resume for what employers want to see. In fact, they usually aren’t ‘built’ at all, but instead they are just a thoughtless collections of data arranged in a fashion that was taught in a 10th grade English class.
2. People don’t build a website (portfolio, personal brand, whatever) to cater to what their visitors want to see. I am talking specifically about online resume/branding sites (like helloerik.com).

Here’s something: have you ever known anyone who is out in the job market to send custom optimized resumes to different prospective employers? People expect to create one homogenous, vanilla resume that is made to have no roughedges and take no risks whatsoever. They desire it to be soft and sweet like a marshmallow.

Why don’t people optimized (A/B test even!) their resume for each and every place they send it? Layout, color, wording, arrangement, style.. whatever! How did we arrive at a place where people try their hardest to create one generic, comprehensive resume?

Granted – most people aren’t on a job hunt trying to land some great job and applying all over the country. Clearly if your resume is being stapled to a job application form, it doesn’t really matter. But for people who are claiming to be design and optimization professionals, people who shape the experience of the user, shouldn’t we be shaping the experience of the people who use our websites and view our materials?

The goal is not to be transparent and risk-free. This is your chance to paint whatever picture you want, and then stand behind it and back it up. Ask yourself “What do these people NEED to see here?” Work history, skills, references? Usually no.

They want to see if you match their (subconscious) expectations of who they want to hire. A bland resume and presentation doesn’t do that. That gives people an ambiguous slate for them to paint on, and no room to paint anything on it yourself.

It’s a bold move. It’s a risky move. But fortune favors the bold. When someone is looking at your resume, website… your cumulative personal brand, I would want them to be saying “This person meets my expectations of who I’m looking for” and not “Does this person meet my expectations of who I’m looking for?”

You can’t read minds, and you can’t predict what people want. But if you feel confident in yourself and your abilities, I say that you present something memorable and authentic. This isn’t some “stand out in a crowd” bullshit either. I don’t subscribe that that particular notion. The sentiment here is “Who cares if you stand out or not – give them something to look at and ask ‘This is what I’ve got, is it what you are looking for?’”

I don’t ever want some prospective viewer of my materials to be unsure and have to ask “Is this how a successful UX designer portrays himself?” Instead, I want them to see something with some balls and say “Well, I am not sure how a successful UX designer portrays himself, but this guy sure is making an attempt!”

The moral of this story? Don’t be generic. But also, don’t stand out in a crowd. Just put the same amount of effort and creativity you put into your work and designs into your personal materials; resume, website, business card, etc etc.

You don’t need to be ‘over the top’, or ostentatious, or braggadocios, or gaudy.  Just define yourself in a way that has hard edges. You don’t want your resume/website/portfolio looking dead on arrival.

1. Neither has ever worked. Lipstick has ever made a pig more attractive, and lace has never improved a bowling ball. Neither fool anyone, and often insult the intelligence of the target audience.

2. Both sayings are often used by people as a acceptable solution to a fundamental problem with design or function. They aren’t metaphors that are supposed to be answers; they are metaphors that are supposed to point out pointless and ineffective measures to improve something.

If you say “it’s like putting lipstick on a pig / lace on a bowling ball,” you should be referring to a failed, obvious attempt at dressing something up, which only served to make the original offending article more apparent.

If you use those metaphors as a solution – you’re missing the point. Neither has ever worked. No amount of lipstick or lace will improve your pig. If you have dolled up your pig, it was a mistake and should be reversed. If you are suggesting we doll up the big – it’s a mistake and should be reevaluated.

Plus, on a professional level, it’s insulting to designers. It’s like saying “We’ve got this wife who is our date, but she is not dressed up at all, her hair is not done, she no makeup, no perfume, no jewelry, but we want you to now put a very thin, useless facade of lipstick on her to hopefully give her some attractiveness. You have 5 seconds to apply this lipstick on while we back the car out of the driveway on our way to the high school reunion.”

If you want your old buddies to think your wife is hot, and your exgirlfriends to be jealous, it’s going to take more than lipstick to make a stunning impression. Lipstick only works if the woman is looking good to begin with.

“A committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”

Let me explain.

A camel is a animal perfectly adapted and finely tuned for its environment and purpose: living in the Sahara Desert in extreme heat with little to no water for extended periods of time. It is a marvel of evolution. When the needs of the “user” arose in the Sahara, a camel was the exact right product for the job. So it probably wasn’t committee got it right; it a great UX team who took the time to research and develop a solution for the problem.

A horse would die in the Sahara. No “committee” is going to build a camel when they try to build a horse. The metaphor is flawed. You aren’t going to “stumble” into building a 4 legged creature who is impervious to heat and dehydration, with built in water stores and massive feet built to not sink into sand.

A horse would be designed for a entirely different purpose. It doesn’t need to have the adaptations that a camel does, because horses do not live in the Sahara. Horses are perfectly adapted for their own environments.

If you want to build a horse by a committee, you don’t end up with a horse. You end up with an abomination of biology and science, something that probably never made it out of the lab. Things designed by committee are rarely happy-accidents, they are usually unusable in any situation.

If you want a camel, design a camel. If you want a horse, design a horse. But don’t try to peddle your committee design as a “the right thing for the wrong situation” coincidence. If you have a functional creature, you probably but a lot of time and care into it, but maybe it was geared for a specific environment that doesn’t fit your goals exactly. If you have something truly built by committee,  you don’t end up with a perfect horse or camel, you end up with this:

This isn’t a post about Apple, or their product. This is about a man who lived the type of life I want to live, but have not. And may not.

A man who cared about what he did, and pursued it with a fury. Only a fool would believe his goal was to become rich. Being a billionaire was a byproduct. A byproduct of passion, and a relentless refusal to succumb to fear or mediocrity.

A man who would rather lose everything and fail than forget that passion and creativity matter, both in your personal life, but also in business. He wasn’t a financial mogul, or a guy who got lucky in the 70′s and have ridden their billions for the last 25 years without ever pushing creative boundaries. He never stopped trying to improve what he felt was his passion.

I see no purpose in discussing the business he built, and lost, and built again. The only thing I take from yesterday’s news is that a man died who did the thing I wish I could do: care about something enough to make it your life, the thing that feeds your passion and soul. To once again value creativity and vision and passion. And to pursue it so relentlessly that you only stop on the edge of death, when you are physically incapable of doing more.

Anyone would be lucky, blessed, to have the type of drive and passion that he had. In any field or endeavor. It is rare that you can say “For him, it wasn’t about the money.” I believe that 100%.

It was about the drive, the will to succeed, the will to follow what your heart and mind want to follow, and doing it without regard for failing or losing it all. That is the man who died yesterday. Who cares about his company or his money, or even his impact on his industry, or even the world.

All I can see is a man who had a huge impact on his own life, something that most of us will never achieve. What we lost was a man who was an example for giving 100% of your heart to something you care about, regardless of the praise or criticism you will garner.

I’m not going to build the next great computer or operating system or music player or gadget. I’m not ever going to be famous, and very likely never be rich. I just hope that when I am near death, I can look back at something, anything, and be able to say with absolute certainty: “I did my best to pursue something I cared about.” Hopefully I can.

Thanks, Steve, for showing me that someone can remain relentless, creative, and passionate both in the depths of failure and in the heights of success.

Blacktop pavement cover me
Like a chemical reaction or a steam roller
Spreading randomly

There’s a distant buzz and low frequency
It tickles my ear, rumbles under my feet
And it shakes the leaves off of every tree, violently
What pretension, everlasting peace
Everything must cease

Institution on the Hill
Like a beacon in the mind of an ancestor
To ignite a people’s will

There’s a shadowed stain on the west facade
It has spread like decay to enshroud the fraud
And the descendants find it oh so odd
Oh so odd
What pretension everlasting peace
Everything must cease

Grave memorial, hewn white stone
Like the comforting caress of a mother
Or a friend you’ve always known

It evokes such pain and significance
What was once, is reduced to remembrance
And the generations pass without recompense

What pretension everlasting peace
Everything must cease

Rest in Peace.

Out of respect to Google and their process, I won’t be talking about any of the specific hoops. There’s no cheat-sheets or pro-tips here. Just my tale of visiting Google HQ in Mountain view.

This is that story.

Email Heard Round The World

May 3rd, 2011 I received an email from someone @google.com. I assumed it was some sort of scam or phishing attempt. I had not sent in an application or resume – in fact, after checking my analytics, I saw how they found me: They did a Google search for:

intitle:ux portfolio

Pretty clever. I have done alot to SEO my site, so at that time I was on page 7… right now I am on page 1, result 7 (from what I can tell doing a search through a proxy so it doesn’t geolocate me to Salt Lake City).

Initial Contact

I replied to the email sort of saying “Yeah sure, hit me with whatever questions you have.” A few days later, I got a call from a random area code. Sure enough, it was Google recruiting. They asked me many of the standard phone screen questions, really basic stuff that wasn’t really UX specific. At this point, I was pretty shocked. It was very surreal to be talking to God.

Screening

After the phone screen, it was a week or so later that I got another email saying I was moving to phase 2. By the way, every time I got moved on to a phase, I was equally shocked each time. It was like Indiana Jones going through the trials at the end of the Last Crusade, only the penitent man will pass.

Anyways – I was told I would have a phone call with one of the UX designers. Uh oh! I geared myself for what I was sure would be the disqualification round. I got another call from Mountain View, and spoke for about an hour with a UX designer. This particular designer worked on “apps” as he put it. Pretty awesome. I answered his questions the best I could, but I did something different this time, compared to how I usually answer on interviews. I did not embelish or try to be impressive. I figured, this is GOOGLE, they aren’t going to be fooled or impressed by bravado or buzzwords. So I just played it straight – gave them solid answers, doing the best I could, but treated them like they had the answers, and it was me who was being tested.

I was sure that was the end. Who am I to be contacted and screened by Google? Little did I know, things were about to get REAL.

Project

A few days later, maybe a week (this whole process took 6 weeks), I was emailed again saying “Congrats! We would like to proceed with phase 3 – the Project.”

I was asked to choose from a selection of micro-projects, which I would complete to specific parameters. I am not going to say what they were, or what I did, I don’t want to give away Google’s process. But I will say, that it was quite a challenge. I had a deadline, and with the pressure of doing something “good enough” to pass on my mind, it was a very nervewracking experience. But, I dove into the micro-project the best I could, did everything they asked me to do, and uploaded it to be viewed by the UX team.

I was sure that that was going to be the end. My project, while good, was far, far from ideal. But I was given very specific parameters I couldn’t surpass – no spending 10 days working on it, I had a tiny window and urgent deadline. It was a test of talent, but also a test of agility.

I uploaded that sucker… and stayed glued to the Analytics I had put on the page.

No visits. No visits. No visits. Boom. 7 visits from “Mountain View” in one day. Things were real now. I was being evaluated by the team, and this is what they were going to use to make their decision on if I continue. Tick tick tick.

About a week later, I got the email: Congratulations Erik! We would like to invite you to an onsite interview here at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.

I tell everyone who is in my inner cicle, “Folks, I have been called upon to visit the most sacred of grounds – The Googleplex.”

Onsite

June 21st at 10am. Perfect summer day. Terrified, I drove onto 1600 Amphitheater Parkway, and into the Google parking lot. Plenty of open spaces, right near the front. No one drives to Google, pssssh. They take one of the Google buses that drive all around the bay area, or they ride bikes. So many bikes. Bikes everywhere. So there I was, stepping out of my car and walking 20 feet to what I can only presume is the equivalent to UX Disneyland. I was early, on purpose, so I just walked around. There were so many buildings, it was like a college campus. People hanging around outside, talking, eating breakfast, walking around. Saw a dude with dreadlocks.

I walked around for about half an hour, saw the volleyball court, the dinosaur T-Rex sculpture, all the freaking bikes. It was the coolest damn workplace I had ever seen.

It was finally time to get down to business. I went to my building, signed in, and got my visitor badge. I sat down in the lobby waiting for the recruiter to come greet me. On the windows behind me was stained glass, made out of Google designs. Also – it was blistering hot under the sun, I was afraid I’d be too sweaty like George Costanza. But I was too nervous to move, I just wanted to sit still and wait for my turn. My recruiter came down, greeted me, and we were on our way. He was a super nice guy, just awesome. Everyone was awesome.

Team Interview

This isn’t intramurals, this is division one football. Right off the bat, they were going to come in with the high heat, fastballs straight past the nose. I was lead into a conference room, and told “Set up your computer, get the projector ready, and the team will be in shortly.” Hoooooly moley. It was almost time. It was like the moments before a big sports game (not that I’d know). Any second, I’d have to put the jitters aside and just dive into the jive.

The team came in. Of course, they were all cool and collected – to them, this was just an hour they had to take out of their day. No big deal. To me, this was the trial of my life. I had to present my project, defend it, and field questions about my portfolio.

I stood there quiet like I always do in interviews, which I’ve had a ton of recently. I don’t smalltalk, I don’t try and make myself more comfortable, I just get ready. Every one was seated, and I asked “We all ready to start?” Everyone kind of nodded, I hit the lights, and clicked my Apple Remote to stat my presentation. Like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk, all the fear and nervousness vanished, and it was smashing time.

Finally I was in my element, the only place I feel comfortable in the world. The only place I come alive. That place: Speaking in front of people. Talking about the one thing I love – work. UX. Problem solving. The internet. Innovation. Invention. I didn’t have to know how to make smalltalk, or conform to social niceties and norms. It was time to lay things down on the line and take control of the situation like a boss.

I started talking, and things just flowed form there. I felt like I was finally in control of myself. I was answering questions with confidence, explaining my project and my portfolio with humility and ferocity at the same time. I was telling jokes and zingers. Hands up on the wall the projection was on, gesturing and pointing and just living it up. I felt great, even though I had no idea the outcome, at least I know I was in the moment, doing my best. Anticipation and fear were gone – it was time to take swings at those fastballs. That’s where everyone is equal. It doesn’t matter who is throwing, or who is batting. All that matters is if you make contact or not. Just keep your eye on the ball and let everything else go.

And, from my perspective, I had a bunch of strikes, a bunch of base hits, a few doubles, a few triples, and I know for certain a homerun or 2 (no grand slams though). People on the UX team actually would interrupt me and tell me that answer was “great” and they had never thought of that before. And these weren’t platitudes, they were genuinely impressed. I had ideas and thoughts on the fly I had never conceived before, I was just getting things thrown at me, and making contact in ways I didn’t think I would. At one point, there was even some light arguing amongst the team, some people thinking the answer was ambiguous and off the mark, and other team members saying “No, I get exactly what he is saying, it sounds great.” That was a huge confidence booster.

I was taken to lunch at one of the many Google cafes. Gourmet food, all buffet style. It was awesome. And all free to the employees. You could eat every meal there all day, and snacks and drinks too. I had an hour to eat with one of the UX designers, sort of talk, and prepare for the rest of the gauntlet. Soon enough, the hour was over and it was time for the one on ones.

The One on Ones

This is where it got hairball. There’s no real need to describe each interview (there were 5 hour long interviews), so I’ll sum them up in a list.

• The questions were hard. They weren’t “gotcha” questions or paradoxes, they were legit questions a UX person would be faced with at the biggest internet juggernaut. I did my best, but a few times I just had to say “I don’t know. The best I can do is postulate an answer, but straight up, I’ve never even considered that idea until you asked.”
• Some questions were based on the premise that a person would know how to handle huge volumes of visitors. I didn’t. I had no idea how to tackle questions that hinged on knowing what the implications of hundreds of millions of pageviews a week entailed.
• I thought too small. This was my biggest mistake. I was in the mindset of my current rank and station in my career – limited resources, limited innovation in the workplace, and limited thought based on past experience. These people were used to literal “anything goes” answers, and I was stuck in smalltime thinking. There was a particular question where I was stuck on using HTML to accomplish something on a mobile device – not realizing that a native app for iOS or Android was well within the bounds of the question. I had never thought of it like that, because in my word, if you couldn’t whip it out in a month using html, php and jquery, you weren’t going to get the time, and probably didn’t have the right resources anyways. At the end, I smacked my head, realizing I should have answered with the biggest, most advanced technologies there were. Huge mistake on my part.
• By the last interview, I had drank a redbull, had 2 excedrins, had a killer migraine, and was tired as all hell. The last interview I had to just limp across the finish line. A huge disappointment. By far my worst performance. I knew that I had sucked, and I just hoped that it didn’t hurt me too bad.

I just sort of collapsed with fatigue, and had to leave immediately to catch my flight at SFO. I had zero idea how I would be judged. Some answers were good, some sucked, but I had made it this far, they had vetted the crap out of me. Who knows, maybe they were looking for someone like me.

Nope. About 2 weeks later, 2 brutal weeks later, I was notified by phone that I was not going to be offered a job. Not much else to say. Just like that, it was over.

Aftermath

The experience was great. Everyone was nice, really encouraging, and totally cooperative. I’ve read things about Google interviews where people complain, but I have none. It was a totally positive experience, and an honor. I wanted to work there in a big way, but I just wasn’t what they wanted at the time. And I don’t blame them, I am sure the other candidates could easily have surpassed me, hell they might have been coming from any of the other tech giants with that massive enterprise experience. I was just outclassed. No hard feelings.

And that’s the Google story. “Come home with your shield, or on it.”

I can say this though – I’m going to try again. Maybe in a year or two, maybe after I work at a few more enterprise class places. But at some point, I’ll be back. I climbed the mountain saw the top. People may argue – but I believe that Google is the pinnacle of UX careers. The depth and breadth of the work there is unsurpassed. In a way, it pumped my ego up, but also smacked it down like a Grizzly Bear smacks down a reckless hiker. Should I feel proud I made it all the way to the onsite interview, or dejected for not having what it takes. I don’t know.

P.S.: This all happened 1 week before Google Plus was announced. And during one of the interviews, I was asked a few questions, vague questions, about how I’d design certain aspects of a social network. I gave my answers, got a few good responses… and a week later I learn that the answers I had given were a part of Google Plus. I had came to some of the same conclusions that the Google engineers had come to probably a year previous when they were planning Google Plus. that was the one thing I was most proud of – I showed myself that I did have the capability to think like a Google UX Designer.

The Google wooden block puzzle they gave me as part of my gift bag.

CityDeals Mobile App – iPhone project. This was a UX project dealing with mobile applications and usability. Strictly UX and information design. This is one of the rare examples where I was not involved in visual design or coding development. A real awesome experience.

PieShares UX Process and Interaction project. This is a process exercise and demonstration of my methods and techniques used when designing an application and the iterative cycle things going through in a rapid release environment. A real winner.

Thanks for reading and I will have new articles up this week! I hope to start a every-other-day release of articles and posts of relevance. Writing things out gives me new insights and ideas I hadn’t though about until it was written down, plus articles are great SEO food. Nom nom nom.

Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence

This is a confusing as hell statement. It takes me a while to get what it means every time I use it or say it. So, I’m going to try and draw a parallel as to why this relates to UX design.

You’re a stakeholder, and you’re looking at your product (be it a site, app, whatever). You don’t see anything wrong with it, so you assume that this proves there is nothing wrong and that everything is great. But just because you don’t see anything wrong doesn’t mean that things are right.

Now, I want to make a special note: I am not saying “because you don’t see anything wrong, you assume that nothing is wrong.” What I am trying to say is “Just because you don’t see anything wrong, doesn’t mean that things are right.” I draw this distinction because often without any real UX, UI, IxD and IA, you may very well be satisfied with “neutral” because the pain points are removed and things are “working” without any apparent defects. It’s like cooking a dish and saying “This is not disgusting.” That statement might satisfy your requirements, but it’s not stating that the dish is good; it may very well be totally bland and neutrally appealing/unappealing.

That is a mediocre analogy of why UX is often needed. The app, the site, the interaction, they aren’t painful or glaring. So why hire a UX guy – things are fine. And they probably are. But I think things should be great.

That’s why I have such a work ethic and drive to always be improving things and driving towards a higher level of construction. No matter how well something performs, no matter how satisfying the experience, you can always work at improving it. Or at least try. Until you reach an undeniable plateau of awesomeness, there’s always more to do. And if you do reach that plateau where you just can’t make it better – move on to something else and now try to make it as awesome as it can be.

It takes a specific personality type to have this drive. And in fact, it might even be a detriment in cases where your dive and passion is seen as officious. Often, people just have these traits, or they don’t. Some people leave work at work, some people go home and chew on the same problems they were working on at work, and keeping working on them all night, not because they love to work – but because they love to solve the problems whether they are “at work” or not. Money, luxury, freedom; these aren’t the goals. Solving problems, figuring things out, and seeing the problem solving as an end unto itself.

Workaholics Anonymous.

For a Graphic Artist, it is very easy to make a portfolio. Show examples of your work, make a gallery, and maybe make a few notes on your technique. People want to see your talent as an artist.

The same can be said for a web developer. A long list of websites created, complete with screenshots, links to the live site, maybe a few wireframes (if you even bothered to make any). People want a website built, you show them websites you’ve built, and if they are good sites, people want you to build them a good site as well.

Demonstrating your role as a UX practitioner.

For UX, showing your “talent” is a more difficult task. How do you show all the meetings and brainstorming sessions? Or how you presented ideas and workflows to your VP’s and key corporate stakeholders? Or how you successfully took a whiteboard session to paper prototypes to Axure to mockups to a final product when all of that is under NDA’s and the intellectual property of the company you were working for at the time?

Internal projects, proprietary software, intangible “work” that takes place in conversation and talk with the rest of the team – these things aren’t something that can be shown in a jQuery lightbox gallery. How do you get around that?

Here are some things I’ve thought of that can demonstrate knowledge, talent and ability, without disclosing things that are either private, under NDA contracts, or just intangible.

1. The easiest, show what you can. If you’ve got a product (site, interface, interaction) that is public, by all means show the pictures of the whiteboard, the graph paper wireframes drawn with a sharpie, the digital wireframes, mockups, and then how they all compare to the finished site.
2. Talk about the project in obfuscated, generalized fashion. Without breaking any NDAs, you can talk about the general process of conceiving a mobile app, how needs were determined, how interface and interaction challenges were identified and overcome, and the process of taking all that into a working model and eventual prototype/product. I liken this to someone who has to give a lecture or keynote speech. You talk about your brain and how it works, not necessarily what you were working on.
3. Write. I personally like to write blog articles on generalized topics. You can show knowledge, depth, thought process, and what you hope is evidence of talent and ability. This may or may not work, since you could be plagiarizing something from another blog. But I like to think that creating an information and entertaining piece may help convince someone that you know what you’re talking about. And if you’re really super great, they might even assume you’re and expert.
4. Make a “proof of knowledge” project. A fictitious site, app, whatever. This way, you go through the process of thinking of an idea, wireframing it, designing the information organization (architecture), mockups, and even development schedules. This way, you can show the UX process without having to actually develop a product. This is probably the best method of showing your skill (other than showing a real project). It can be time consuming, so pick something that will really highlight everything. I still need to do one of this; it’s in the hopper.

I really don’t have an answer to this. Hopefully you, and I, can provide enough data to get an on-site interview, at which point you can just attack the whiteboard for the interview and really show them your toolbox.

But if you ask me, the real secret is to just wow them with bullshit and follow it up with a strawman and emotional manipulation.

I’m making the UX portfolio alot more relevant, highlighting blog posts more, and making the visual design portfolio not so prominent, since that’s not what I’m focusing on in my career anymore. It will still be there, but too many people were going there first and missing the UX stuff. Gotta convert those visitors to the right areas!

Alot of showing off UX is through information, so my blog posts and articles highlight the knowledge necessary to be a UX professi0nal, since it’s really hard to show that in “examples.” Hopefully you will all like what I am doing here. Should be done by the end of the day today…

Preface: I am not suggesting that you abandon best practices and trying to easily include as many edge and near-edge cases that you can. I am just trying to point out a line of diminishing returns, and eventually you’re optimizing your sites width and usability for the grandma at the library kiosk on a Pentium 150mhz running a 13″ CRT at 800×600 in IE6 and Windows 98 Special Edition.

So I’ve recently been developing the UI for a browser-based application. It is for internal use only, so my user group is set to the company employees that use it.

I wanted to gather some usage statistics on the most common screen resolution used in our company. Well, there was nothing in the app as far as analytics goes, so I had no data to retrieve.

Instead, I just did some soft-science and watched what people were doing, and walked around the office noting the screen resolution of a sample of users, and how they interacted with this browser based app.

Come to find out, I could go wider than the “safe” 960px and still be safe with my user base. But what I also found out was that if someone didn’t have their browser maximized and the right side of the app was cut off, they simply just maximize their browser or drag the corner until the app fits.

90% of people can see the entire width of my site. 95% can see the width of the content and half the menu. 98% can see the content. To reach 98% of visitors being able to see the entire width of your site, it would need to be no bigger than 750 pixels. There is no sane web developer or stakeholder that would build anything to be able to work within 750 pixels. It’s just not possible while maintaining any modern usability.

98% – 750 Pixels Wide

This is by no means a scientific study, but I took a few popular websites and ran them through the Google Browser size experiment, and then drew a red line at the “98% – 750 pixels wide” mark.

Overstock.com

Overstock.com easily fits in the 90% range, but their site does not crush down to fit within the 98% range. The 750px line cleaves clean through part of their main carousel, and completely obliterates their right hand content.

Amazon.com

Same as Overstock.com, Amazon.com doesn’t come close to the 98% range. The red line cuts right through their main banner, the right hand content, and a good 20-25% of their masthead and nav.

CNN.com

CNN.com doesn’t make the cut. Almost their entire right side of content is cleaved clean away, along with a good 25% of their top navigation and information.

Wikipedia.org

Wikipedia uses a fairly fluid design, and they actually make the cut! Look at all that content smashed down to fit in the 750px width, creating huge, tall, unreadable columns. But, they are making their site browsable to all those people who have their IE6 maximized on their 15″ CRT monitor running at 800×600.

SmashingMagazine.com

Oh dear, it appears that the 750 pixel read line decapitates Smashing Magazine. The right hand content is total scorched earth, and so are all their social networking buttons and top navigation. The kinds of web content and design, only to be brought down by browser viewport sizing!

So what, now what?

I am finding myself thinking “this is a great min/max experiment, but how this effects actual usage is largely a small consideration.”

Many websites are abandoning the “above the fold” doctrine. People have been scrolling vertically online for almost 2 decades now, it’s as ubiquitous as 7 digit phone numbers (as opposed to 50 years ago when they were 5 or less).

The point being: every browser comes with a maximize button, and people know how to use it. Trying to determine the viewport size for every case, and edge-case, is an academic endeavor. If you have time to optimize your site for every possible viewport and resolution, you clearly don’t have enough paying work to keep you busy.

Again – it’s great to study edge-cases and try to incorporate them, but for day to day application, I’d say to make the cutoff at 2 standard deviations, maybe even 1.5.

I’d love to know the mean and modal viewport sizes, but that’s not going to hold up development if I don’t. For now, it’s a little bit of data and a bunch of common sense.

And to keep things fair, here’s my own site. I’m comfortable with the 90% mark. Here’s my browser lab shot, and also my analytics on screen resolution (not browser viewport – I trust people to grab a corner and drag).