I’ve been working on a bunch of holiday card emails for clients lately and they’ve all had designers asking if we can resize people’s browser windows to fit the square box they designed for the flash-based card. The answer is yes, but no.
Most people think everyone uses the computer just like they do, although there are so many different ways to work with computers that most people don’t do any one thing. This means that most people are wrong in their assumptions about most people. Yet most people don’t realize this. (This is true for so many things, but I won’t go into that.)
Resizing people’s browser windows is always a bad idea, in my opinion. Nothing you could create is so important to rearrange my stuff and possibly affect the default settings on my computer. It’s especially a bad idea to do this from an email, where the user may not already have a browser window open and it’s more likely that you’re going to screw with their defaults. If the user closes the window without any other windows open, you’ll reset their preferred size for all new windows to be the size you selected for your holiday flash box. The user must figure out how to undo this after they’ve finished being abused by your content. Don’t even get me started on taking away people’s toolbars and menus. Just try to figure out how to get a menu back without a menu. The remotest chance of doing this to any of your recipients should be avoided at all cost.
It’s a bit like giving someone a gift and then coming over and rearranging their furniture so that your gift is perfectly displayed in their living room. Yea, nice, but get over yourself. I appreciate the gift but the rearranging my stuff part left a sour taste in my mouth. Hmm, how do I get you to not do that next year…
Yes, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid this or recover from it. There are even complicated hoops you can jump through to avoid setting people’s future window sizes. But why? Why should the user have to know what they’re doing? Are you really that much of a design nazi? The true problem is that you’ve designed a square box, not a flash page. Flash resizes very nicely to fit the window, why not just take advantage of that? Put padding around the flash content and let it fill the window, whatever size your recipient prefers.
Either way, I decide what size my browser window should be, not you. If you resize my browser window you better have an unsubscribe link.