The Art of Reading
We use aesthetic Interfaces to attract users to our platforms but forget to pay attention to the one of the most important aspects in design, the text used on applications. In some cases it is actually the content that defines how the website or the app must me designed. This is especially true in case of blogs and discussion forum where the main motive is to get one to read. Let’s have a look on how your user reads to make more efficient designs.
The process
Reading isn’t as fluid as it seems. At first glance it looks as if our eyes move smoothly with the words we read in our mind or out aloud. But, that’s not what is happening. In fact, we make quick sharp jumps called saccades with moment of stillness (fixations) in between. Our eyes look forward most of the saccades but 10–15% of the times we tend to look backwards at the previous words.
Readability
The structure and content of a paragraph helps decides how readable it will be to a particular audience. For example a paragraph from a high level book in biology might seem jigbrish to the common eye but make sense to a biologist. The way any text is written also influences the user’s interest in reading the article.
The Flesch-Kincaid formula is commonly used to calculate the readability of text. It provides both a reading ease score and a reading grade-level score. The higher the score the more readable the text is.
Patterns
People are programmed to recognize patterns. A pattern which is will me more easily interpreted in comparison to something we are not used to. This is why we take more time to read a paragraph written in all capital letters. We are just used to reading mixed case. It is a myth that mixed case is more readable. We encode letters and word as patterns. One can write letter ‘A’ in Helvetica or Noto Sans, the user would still be able to make out what it says. The speed however depends on the familiarity of that font. The more decorative font tend to be harder to read.
Size does matter
When it comes to text, the font size plays a crucial role in deciding the readability of the paragraph. It’s not just the older folks who complain on the font size bring too small, the young audience also faces problems with such issues. Some fonts can be the same size, but look bigger, due to the x-height. The x-height is literally the height of the small letter x in the font family. Different fonts have different x-heights, and as a result, some fonts look larger than others, even though they are the same point size. Fonts such as Tahoma and Veranda have been designed keeping in mind larger x-heights. So, one should always choose a font size that is large enough for the audience to read.
It’s not just the size of fonts that matters, the length of a sentence also plays a role. Studies show that people read faster when the length of the line tends to be longer but when asked upon, they almost always say that they would prefer paragraphs with shorter line lengths. This is contradicting with the experiment. So, shorter line length is commonly used unless reading speed is an issue.
Device
Reading on a paper or kindle is different from reading on screen. The content on the former two devices is stable and reflection is used to read, whereas the screens on modern electronic devices is always refreshing, hence the content is not stable and these are light emitting devices. Using enough contrast and breaking up text into chunks is helpful on such devices.
Conclusion
As a designer you must always may attention to the text being used in the products. It is the content of a site or an application that makes that makes or breaks the deal for an organization. Hence, text deserve as much attention as any other aspect in design. Most of the content in this post is a summary from a section of the book “100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know” by Susan Weinschenk. It is a must read for all the budding designers out there.
