The Average Web User

A huge task in web design is not only deter­min­ing the demo­graph­ics of your intended audi­ence but also fig­ur­ing out the mea­sure of tech­nol­ogy that they use to view your web­site. The W3Counter has a global report on user’s envi­ron­ments in order to most suc­cess­fully develop for the largest num­ber of environments.

Before I give what I feel to be the “aver­age” web user it should be noted that these sta­tis­tics aren’t the best for every audi­ence. For instance, if your site is on bleeding-edge tech­nol­ogy then it’s pretty safe to assume that you’ll have the best in web tech­nol­ogy to design for; one exam­ple is that my Mint instal­la­tions tell me that this site receives 63% of the users using Fire­fox, but my main blog, which has more of an aver­age user base, has 33% of the users using Fire­fox. Be sure to take these sta­tis­tics with cau­tion, and also be sure to do proper demo­graphic and usabil­ity stud­ies to deter­mine your tar­get audience’s technology.

The “Aver­age” Web User

From W3Counter’s lat­est sum­mary and my main blog’s Mint instal­la­tion, I believe we can sum­ma­rize the aver­age user as hav­ing a mix of the fol­low­ing conditions:

  • Browser: Inter­net Explorer 6.0/7.0; Fire­fox 1.5+
  • Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Win­dows XP/Vista
  • Screen Res­o­lu­tion: 1024x768+
  • Lan­guage: Eng­lish (Majority)
  • Flash: Most Users Have Ver­sion 8+

Final Obser­va­tions

It is quite clear that Microsoft is still dom­i­nat­ing the web world in terms of browser and oper­at­ing sys­tem. How­ever, Fire­fox is con­tin­u­ally gain­ing now hold­ing around a 30% mar­ket share. That’s impres­sive for an open source prod­uct! Inter­net Explorer 6 still reigns supreme, and that means we still have to live with most users not sup­port­ing mod­ern CSS stan­dards includ­ing their bro­ken box model and the :hover pseudo-class on all ele­ments besides the anchor tag. PNG trans­parency is still some­thing that the major­ity of designs can’t yet take advan­tage of.

The 800x600 res­o­lu­tion has long been the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor to design for, but I think we’re com­ing near the end of this res­o­lu­tion being some­thing to design for (as hap­pened to 640x480). The tech­nol­ogy is advanc­ing, but we still have a ways to go in order to effec­tively uti­lize a wide range of up and com­ing technologies.

4 Comments

  1. 800x600 and below is still at least 10% of web surfers, so it’s hard to stop design­ing for them… on the other hand, they’re increas­ingly exposed to designs that don’t fit their win­dow well, so whether you are going to drive those users away with, say, an 780 pixel body with per­haps a right-hand side­bar off screen is questionable.

    Dan Grossman on 06.04.07

  2. @Dan: Yes, I agree. I still for conservative’s sake still stick to a fixed width of 760, but I assume that can change soon.

    Chris Poteet on 06.04.07

  3. Hello choir, this is preacher…

    I too agree, we still have to sup­port 800 x 600, but that doesn’t mean we need to limit appli­ca­tions to a fixed width. (I per­son­ally pre­fer the jello mold lay­out http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/jello.html).

    How­ever, I feel richer web appli­ca­tions are going to become the stan­dard. (Look at the pop­u­lar­ity of AJAX) This desire will move devel­op­ment more toward Flash and Sil­verLight solu­tions. At which point, vec­tor imag­ing will over­come the res­o­lu­tion debate. But that’s not for another 5 to 10 years. Of course that’s just my opin­ion, I could be wrong.

    Justin Kohnen on 06.05.07

  4. @Justin: You might enjoy this arti­cle on Flex­i­ble Fixed Lay­outs. It sounds sim­i­lar to the link you provided.

    While Flash and Sil­verlight are pow­er­ful tools, I won­der as the web becomes less and less about a desk­top com­puter that we will once again be stuck to wor­ry­ing about small res­o­lu­tions but far smaller than 800x600 (e.g. cell phone, Palm Pilot, etc). I think this would be a good envi­ron­ment for vec­tors, but robust ani­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy might be a ways away.

    Chris Poteet on 06.05.07

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