Offering a consistent, good user experiences across large desktop monitors and small tablet screens is paramount to Windows 8’s success; in a recent post on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft discusses how they plan to do it.
In a recent post on the Building Windows 8 blog, David Washington, a senior program manager on Microsoft’s User Experience team, talks about the extensive research Microsoft is doing and design decisions that have been made to ensure a “a polished, consistent, and predictable user experience” with the company’s upcoming OS on a wide range of screen sizes. In addition, Microsoft would also like to give developers the ability to build apps that look and function the same, regardless of form factor. To do so will require careful planning and an intelligently designed interface that deals with the challenges of differing resolutions and pixel densities, which is no easy task.Whether or not Microsoft is able to put together an OS that serves virtually every market segment from tablets to high-end, multi-screen gaming PCs remains to be seen, but that’s what the company is trying to do. If Windows 8 is to offer as a good user experience on a desktop system with multiple monitors and a 10” tablet with a relatively low-resolution screen, Microsoft must design a product that can scale from very high resolutions with relatively low pixel densities (pixels per inch, or PPI) to somewhat low resolutions with high pixel densities.
As pixel densities increase, the size of objects as they appear on-screen gets smaller, or vice versa. For example, a 100 pixel wide image would be 1” wide on a screen with a 100PPI pixel density. On a screen with a 200PPI pixel density, however, that image would be half the size and would only get smaller as the pixel density increases. To deal with this challenge, Microsoft is implementing intelligent scaling algorithms and giving developers tools to more easily deal with differing resolutions and pixel densities. For example, images will be automatically scaled to 140% of their original size for HD tablets or 180% for quad-XGA tablets.
From the post, “the 140% scale is optimized for 1920×1080 HD tablets, which has 140% of the baseline tablet resolution of 1366×768. These optimized scale factors maintain consistent layouts between the baseline tablet and the HD tablet, because the effective resolution is the same on the two devices. Each scale percentage was chosen to ensure that a layout that was designed for 100% 1366×768 tablets has content that is the same physical size and the same layout on 140% HD tablets or 180% quad-XGA tablets.” That is a fancy way of saying content will be scaled to have the same physical dimensions on-screen where possible, while still being able to exploit the additional clarity afforded by a high-PPI display
Screen real-estate is wasted with apps that don’t scale properlyWindows 8 platform makes building one app that scales to different screen sizes straightforward for the developer by providing built-in layout controls and techniques. Apps in Windows 8 fill the available space by bringing in more content where possible. A developer can easily build the same app to show more content as the screen size changes from a tablet, to a laptop with a bigger screen, all the way up to a desktop monitor.” Forgetting about apps for a moment, the Metro interface itself is a great example of something that can exploit high resolutions. With Metro, users with 27” monitors with 2560×1440 resolutions will be able to fit more tiles on-screen than users with smaller, lower-resolution monitors.The ultimate goal is to have Windows 8 take advantage of any additional pixels or additional pixel density by either scaling images to maintain their physical dimensions, while also offering better clarity, or showing more content on screen.
Dealing with resolutions is a different matter. “The
