Hello, I’m fielding a survey that starts on Qualtrics then redirect participants to Fresco. I recruited my sample using Prolific an online panel platform and and I just had a respondent reach out to me to say that they were not able to complete the Fresco portion of the survey on their 8" tablet, even in landscape orientation. They got the message that happens when you try to use a mobile phone saying that their screen is too small. The Fresco FAQ currently just says
“Participants can use any computer or tablet with a supported browser for interviews. Smartphones or small-screen devices are not compatible. Tablets should be used in landscape mode for optimal viewing during interviews”
The Prolific interface allowed me to indicate to respondents at recruitment respondents must use a laptop or tablet and I informed them of the preferred browsers, so I think this might just mean that there’s still a limit to the size of tablet that will work with Fresco? I had tested it using a 10" iPad that worked fine. Just wanted to report the issue.
Thanks for reaching out. It’s great to hear you’re using the Fresco within a Prolific study.
Fresco is designed to be used on devices with a screen width of at least 1024px for important usability reasons. This means, that any devices below this pixel count will trigger an overlay preventing the user from seeing the survey and advising that they need a larger screen in order to complete the survey. While it’s probably safe to say as a general rule of thumb that devices with screen sizes of 9.7" or larger are compatible with Fresco, there may be cases (in particular, newer devices) where the pixel density of the device meets the requirements while being physically smaller.
You make a great point that we should probably add some additional text to clarify this on our documentation pages to avoid this confusion for others. Sorry for this hiccup in your study, and thank you for posting!
Kate’s answer is perfect. I would just add that the reason we made this decision is that for smaller devices it becomes physically impossible to fit user-interface elements on a screen in a way that is readable (we try to follow WCAG accessibility guidelines) by most people. An 8" tablet is really quite small, so either the text would have to be very tiny, or the amount of information that is displayed (including important things such as the question prompts and fields in a long form) would become truncated/hard to use.
With that said, there are a couple of options:
Disabling the small screen message in your fork of fresco would be a very small code edit. If you want to do this, I can tell you how.
We could make the display of this message a setting in the app that can be turned off for people who are certain that their study will work with smaller screens with their population.
Let me know if you want to talk further about either of these ideas.
Thanks @Joshua and @Kate for the quick responses. This is very helpful insight. I did also have another respondent be told their display is too small but,
My display is a 55 inch smart TV and my resolution is set at 1920 x 1080. I hit F11 to maximize my window and CTRL+Shift+R to force a manual refresh. It didn’t work… I looked up the pixel count for my windows setting and it says, “A 1280 x 1024 resolution display has a total of 1,310,720 pixels.”
Because the survey is already live, I don’t think I want to tinker with the Fresco code right now. What I’m interested in more so is how to effectively communicate to current participants having issues and future participants the requirements of Fresco? Because even the 9.7" rule of thumb still wouldn’t really account for this person still having trouble using their smart TV.
It seems like in our effort to make this simple, we have made it a little confusing! Basically, the situation is this:
The “small screen” message is shown if the window is less than 64rem wide.
‘rem’ is a unit of size defined relative to the font size of the “root element”. This font size is device and user specific, but is usually set at 16px. Thus 16px times 64 relative units = 1024px. If the font size is larger, either because the user has increased it or the operating system sets a larger one, this value will increase. This will in turn mean that the window will need to be wider to avoid the “small screen” message.
To be clear: “window” means the size of the viewable area of the browser, and not the display’s total resolution. It also does not include parts of the browser UI, such as menus, toolbars, or sidebars.
I suspect that what is happening is that your user with the smart tv as a monitor is either using the window scaling feature of windows (which will scale the effective resolution of their display down), or is using a larger font size (which will scale the effective width requirements up). Either of these would cause the message to be shown when the screen seems to be large enough, when in fact it isn’t.
What I can say for certain is that anyone who sees this message is using a screen that is definitely too small to properly display the network canvas interface.