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Theory
Whether your web design skills were acquired through formal education or self-taught learning, there is one aspect of design that commonly gets overlooked — typography. In the following, we’ll take a look at what typography really is, why it affects the usability of your website, and how you can use typography to rise your design to the next level.
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Theory
While multimedia is becoming increasingly popular on the Web, there is no way around classic text to effectively communicate with your visitors. I admit, the Internet has been around for awhile now and you might think: “Text, don’t we all know by know how to handle it?” And I agree, we’ve had enough time to internalize the basics about written web content. For some reason, however, there are plenty of sites that still struggle with their text presentation.
A while back we looked at how to write successful web content and we gained insights into how to make content targeted, attractive, and effective. Now, let’s zoom in closer and look at how you can make sure that your content is readable. Did you know that reading online is 25 percent slower than reading from printed material? According to a study by Nielsen, your visitors read only between 20 and 28 percent of the words on your site.
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Demo UX Cases
I believe that the user experience of mobile newspaper websites can be greatly improved. Armed with feedback from a small remote user test of the mobile pages of two big newspapers, I want to explain why I think these sites fail in some key area’s, and make some suggestions for improvement.
The USA Today and the Washington Post are both among the biggest newspapers in the United States. They differ in their tone of voice, but together they form a very rough average of the mobile newspaper sites available.
I’ll look at the user experience of these sites by discussing two use case scenario’s, and afterwards explain how these sites can be improved by less clutter, better typography, and a stronger visual hierarchy.