{"id":31,"date":"2008-04-25T18:17:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-25T23:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/25\/larger-displays-are-better-more-displays-are-better\/"},"modified":"2008-04-25T18:17:05","modified_gmt":"2008-04-25T23:17:05","slug":"larger-displays-are-better-more-displays-are-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/25\/larger-displays-are-better-more-displays-are-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Larger Displays are Better. More Displays are Better."},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s Jakob Nielsen’s economic justification for giving employees large screens<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you’ll recover the investment in less than a year. (The typical corporate overhead doubles the company’s per-employee cost; always remember to use loaded cost, not take-home salary, in any productivity calculation.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jeff Atwood has written a “one-stop-shop for research data supporting the idea that, yes, having more display space would<\/em> in fact make you more productive”<\/a>. But he warns us<\/a> that “Having all that space can make you less productive due to all the window manipulation excise you have to deal with to make effective use of it.”He calls this the Large Display Paradox<\/a>. But, there are solutions<\/em> to this problem. Using software to divide the large single-display into a “grid” of virtual “monitors” is the one he proposes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A recent and widely publicized<\/a> University of Utah study concluded that people were less productive on a 26″ screen then an 18″ screen. (Unfortunately I haven’t found a better link to their actual data<\/em> then this crappy PDF brochure<\/a>.) However, they also found that people were more productive with two<\/strong> 20″ screens. Their 26″ monitor was 1920×1200 pixels = 2.3 MP, their 20″ was 1600×1200 pixels = 1.92MP, so two 20″ screens = 3.84 MP, quite a bit bigger then the 26″ screen, and with greater productivity. This supports the theory with the right windowing system, productivity increases as the number of usable pixels increases.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve only found one exception to the “bigger is better” rule of workspaces. Portability (Availability)<\/strong> can be worth more then pure productivity. There’s an old gunslinger saying that “The best gun in the world is the the one I’ve got in my hand right now”. Similarly, having a “big iron” on your office isn’t much use if you are flying somewhere over the atlantic. There’s no substitute for having a computer in-hand<\/em>. Even if you would be more productive using a 17″ laptop, it’s better to get a 13″ ultra-portable, if it means you are more likely to actually have it around when you need<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

Business travelers, and creative professionals who work better in eclectic settings, are examples of people who are better served by the smallest<\/em> sufficiently-powerful laptop they can find. But for most people bigger is better<\/strong>. Fortunately, small laptops can be connected to large displays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s Jakob Nielsen’s economic justification for giving employees large screens, Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,11,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility","category-design","category-research","category-tips","category-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}