Google shows that size does matter

Monday 21 December 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

The web wizards at Mountain View have been busy analysing the way that Internet users view information in their various browsers and now they have made that data available to web designers in a useful new tool.

In a post on the Official Google Blog made on Wednesday, one of the corporation's Senior Software Engineers, Bruno Bowden, explains how size really does matter when it comes to websites. With the proliferation of monitor sizes today, browsers are not always full screen and other items such as toolbars can take up valuable space, so it's not always clear exactly how much of your website a visitor can see at first glance, without scrolling.

Bowden noticed that many people who visited the 'Download Google Earth' page never actually clicked the download button, even though it seemed hard to miss. Wondering whether users' browser windows were too small to see the button, he set about analysing the size of visitors' browser windows when they viewed this page. He cleverly devised a way of rendering several weeks' data of browser sizes into a kind of contour 'map'.

Using this visualisation, Bowden was able to confirm that about 10% of users could not see the download button without scrolling, and so never noticed it. This problem was easily fixed by a simple redesign of the page, as Bowden explains:

"…on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the 'Download' button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before."

Seeing the benefits of this kind of analysis, Bowden – thoughtful chap that he is – set about making the tool accessible to the world. The result of his generous activity is a clever tool called Google Browser Size, which the company has now made available to the public on Google Labs.

Web designers – amateur or professional – who want to try it out simply need to visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page they would like to analyse. The size overlay they will see there uses the latest data from visitors to google.com, giving a realistic and up-to-date indication of which parts of their website are generally visible and which aren't.

Bruno Bowden explains how the tool is helpful:

"Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience."

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