Large Monitors: The Easiest Way to Increase White-Collar Productivity

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, makes a point about large monitors that I completely affirm:

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.)

Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.

I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.

Starting at 1600×1200, users rarely stretch their browser windows to the full screen because few websites work well on such a wide canvas. Big windows are magic for working on spreadsheets, graphic design, and many other tasks, but not for the current paradigm of Web pages. Today, big-screen Web users typically utilize their extra space for multiple windows and parallel browsing.

In sum: Get a big monitor — at least 1600×1200 resolution and 24 inches. It might cost a little more, but in a very real sense it may be wasteful not to.

As an aside, here is a very interesting comment that he makes on where the web may be going as monitor resolution grows even more. Very, very interesting:

To serve Web users with truly big screens in the future, we’ll probably need a different paradigm than individual pages. Perhaps a more newspaper-like metaphor or a different information dashboard will prove superior down the road.

No related posts.

March 11, 2009 | Filed Under Internet | 6 Comments 

Comments

6 Responses to “Large Monitors: The Easiest Way to Increase White-Collar Productivity”

  1. don gale on March 11th, 2009 6:45 am

    This is completely true. When I started at this job, I was using a 15″ CRT. I got promoted last year and was given a 17″ LCD Viewsonic. It’s not quite 1600×1200, but I noticed a huge difference. I can do more at one time, but the biggest upside is that the reports I run from our accounting system actually fit the screen. Before I would have to scroll down just to see the bottom 3″ of the report. Now it all fits on one screen. As small as that sounds, it saves a lot of time.

    By the way…I love this blog. Great posts!

  2. Michael E on March 11th, 2009 9:35 am

    I’ll almost agree.

    As a programmer, I don’t really want a single monitor larger than 24″; that much uninterrupted screen real estate is hard to manage. I find the 30″ monitors on some of the computers in the CS grad student lab a bit unwieldy. 1600×1200 is nice, though.

    What really increases my productivity is having 2 monitors. My ideal setup would have 2 ~21″ 1600×1200 monitors. This way I can have my code on one screen and documentation on the other, or code and software testing.

    I also rarely run with anything maximized. Occasionally I’ll maximize a visualization or chart; I also usually vertically maximize my code editing windows (and like being able to have two such windows side by side on a monitor). Web browsers, etc., I use at a smaller size with some overlap.

  3. Duncan on March 11th, 2009 11:13 am

    I can’t get enough screen area – although large physical sized monitors w/o extremely high resolution don’t cut it either…

    I live on 2 computers: workstation w/dual monitors and my laptop with an external screen… I will dual display my laptop w/the big screen and laptop screen as well…

    I also believe in virtual desktops too…

    I am an engineer – lots of graphics, excel, ppt, and coding projects going on…

  4. GTDGirl on March 11th, 2009 11:51 am

    I bought a monitor (24″) that runs 1600 x 12000, and my laptop monitor to the side and I have huge productivity improvements.

    I am one of those knowledge workers constantly in Excel files of metrics, building presentations, researching competitors, etc…my company would not give me a monitor due to their internal policy that anyone on a laptop does not get an external monitor. I spent $250 on a “Chimei” brand monitor and brought it to work.

    Not ideal for anyone to spend their own money to make their company more money but my day-to-day work enviornment was too difficult to manage. The split monitors with the laptop also allow me to follow along on conference call/Live Meeting prezos while still getting work done.

  5. jeffrey on March 12th, 2009 9:17 am

    Another helpful tool for larger monitors is The Wonderful Icon, a neat piece of compact freeware.

    With ‘Wonderful’, you can bind keyboard shortcuts to quick tasks such as ’tile all windows vertically/horizontally.’ Very useful if you have something like Michael E‘s setup, and especially if you’re in computing/coding.

  6. Andy Breeding on September 3rd, 2009 3:09 pm

    Note that the original article cited was published in 2006. Prices for big monitors have dropped alot since then..

Leave a Reply