Does One Screen Size Fit All?

Screens are everywhere.

I carry one in my pocket and stare at two all day. When I get home, my kids are camped out in front of one watching Big Bird and Elmo teach them the ABC’s. My wife can be found in front of one, running her business or shopping online. There’s one mounted on the gas pump where I fill my tank and another in the elevator where I have meetings with clients. Screens are everywhere in all shapes and sizes.

I once heard a great thought; I loved it so much I stole it for myself- “In the design business, it’s all just pixels hitting glass.” The new wrinkle to this? How many pixels and how big is the glass?

With a huge push for mobile applications and sites designed for smaller screens, the job of the designer as well as the marketer becomes more challenging. Smaller chunks of very specific information need to be displayed in a way that can be easily interacted with and acted upon with a varied set of controls. Building sites that depend mainly on mouse and keyboard interactions has given way to multi-touch screens and track balls.

On the flip side of the mobile trend is the growing use of the living room television as means to deliver content. From WebTV, Roku, and Skype-enabled TVs (coming soon), to Twitter and Facebook integrated with Verizon FiOS, the big screen is becoming a powerful medium for bringing content to the entire family.

As screen real estate and resolution grows, the challenges grow as well. Our need to display information in a concise yet compelling way creates a new set of guidelines and best practices that in many ways are yet to be fully realized and defined.

Today, content is making screens more ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Whether watching Hulu and Fancast, or streaming Netflix movies to a computer, or surfing the Internet on plasma TV, or reading Moby Dick on Kindle or iPhone- the content lines become blurred. Swapping between content types becomes more seamless, as each plays into the other. I can shop HSN with my remote and the cost of the item is simply added to my cable bill, thus introducing business model opportunities coupled with technology and content development challenges.

With content and interaction becoming more closely integrated, simplified and available wherever and whenever the user wants it, the interfaces and interactions that support this content delivery must be in concert. Our challenge as designers and marketers is to push ourselves to see past the pixels and forget about the glass. Can a message be delivered with the same power to a phone and an HDTV? Can this task be just as easy to perform on mobile device as a desktop?

So, what’s the next screen format and size? Keep up with your user experiences and screen size to determine when and if it fits your content. Be sure to do so or both your content and brand might become unrecognizable on any screen.