Overview

"If you are a designer, you'll be glad to know that the same rules of design apply to the web as to print or any other medium."

Ben Benjamin

http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Howto/Design/index.html

People have been putting text and pictures on computer screens for 30 years or more, so we didn't expect to find anything new in the area of page layout and design. Conventional wisdom and most of the popular web design books suggest an approach similar to traditional screen design or paper.

It's not that easy, however. We were surprised to see that some "old standards" of page layout, like white-space and horizontal rules, have their drawbacks on web sites. And we were dumbfounded when we saw the statistics about how text readability affects user success and perceptions.

Our Theory: Skimming Is In

The results in this chapter are easier to understand when you consider that most of the people we tested didn't read all the information on a page. They scanned the text as they searched for an answer. Only when they found something that looked plausible did they actually read the text. Page layouts that made skimming easy fared better than those that didn't.

Readability and the Web

Readability measures like the Gunning Fog Index and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale were developed to calculate how "readable" a passage of text is. These scales attempt to measure reading difficulty by words, sentences, syllables, and so on, then feeding those numbers into an algorithm.

We had theorized that...