97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 10. Scrolling Through Time

Kim MacCormack

TWELVE YEARS AGO, my team was hired to develop a web application as a subcontractor for a graphic design firm. We were to have no direct contact with the customer. All of the requirements were relayed by the client to our prime contractor, and then passed on to us in a series of random emails.

One email concerned the screen resolution our artists should use. The previous standard had been 640×480, but more current research suggested that the web site should support up to an 800×600 resolution. (Today the most common screen resolution is 1,024×768.) Even though this was an experienced design firm, its formal requirements (which we never saw) to the customer stated:

The layout of each page will conform to a fixed 800-pixel width standard and 600-pixel height standard.

If we had seen this requirement, we would have immediately corrected the statement to read, "The layout of each page will conform to a fixed 800-pixel width standard, to support up to an 800×600 monitor resolution." Since we had worked on many websites, we knew that the most important dimension was the width. Users hate scrolling horizontally, while vertical scrolling is considered one of the realities, if not advantages, of using a browser. However, evidently this valuable truth was never conveyed to the customer.

The content this novice website customer provided for each web ...