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39
I believe neither is “easier” to read in general, and I would instead try to make it a country-dependent setting that mimics the common book spine orientation, either in the visitor’s country or in the web site’s country.
In Wikipedia’s book entry, the spine tilting section says the following:
In the United States, the Commonwealth and in Scandinavia, ...
33
UPPERCASE text is harder to read because the shapes of all the uppercase letters are all rectangular and users are not used to reading text that way. Therefore it is harder to scan, less efficient, and consequently a bad thing for readability.
See also this article from UXMovement: Why Text in All Caps is Hard for Users to Read. And quoting from that ...
29
Underlining non-link text is a sort of usability crime. Underline is a standard way of visualizing links, especially when the default blue isn't use for links, so underline can confuse web users as to what's a link. Even in desktop applications, underlined text often means "I'm clickable".
Everyone knows that text that’s underlined, or is a different ...
28
Short Answer
Make them like tabs and follow that mental model (clockwise on right, counter-clockwise on left, upright on bottom).
Medium Answer
If your design uses tab-like elements, follow the logic of tabs. If it uses book-like elements, follow that model and pick a direction—if you're in the US, follow the orientation of book spines here (clockwise). And ...
27
It depends on how you are using it.
All caps can be fine when used correctly. The site you have referenced does look slightly odd to me, this could be because of the typeface itself. Certain typefaces such as Trajan Pro and Bebas consist of only all caps characters. These types of typefaces are usually used very successfully in headers and titles. The ...
23
Your example shows left-to-right languages, and its better to keep the rotation of the letters the same since we see words as shapes rather than reading letter by letter.
That's probably why you see more feedback signs where the word is rotated 90 degrees rather than each letter:
When we read - we read the shape the word gives us, which also answers the ...
21
I would answer no, the terminal punctuation should not be included in the hyperlink. It is the text that is being hyperlinked rather than the construct that the text is a part of.
Consider other such constructs: in an unordered list you wouldn't include the bullet point in a hyperlink, in an ordered list you wouldn't include the number, and in a ...
19
Wikipedia is, I suppose, the ultimate in hyperlink use and has quite a strict linking style guideline for the ways in which URLs and hyperlinks are used within the text. Editors who don't conform to the style are quickly picked up - especially on more popular articles.
I have to say it really does make for a pretty consistent reading experience from one ...
19
I hate to be this guy, but The W Blog has an article digesting some research suggesting that the presumed "letter shape" theory is incorrect on why CAPS LOCK is harder to read. It's a good article that cites real research you can delve into as deeply as you like, it suggests that the presumed reasons (letter shape ect.) for why UPPERCASE is hard to read are ...
19
For two main reasons,according to Microsoft posted 3 days ago:
We’ve chosen to use uppercase styling in the top menu for two main reasons: 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences, and 2) to provide added structure to the top menu bar area.
On the first point, the use of uppercase text is becoming a ...
18
I can think of a few reasons.
It's a simpler mental model. You copy something and you paste it. You don't paste the result of some transformation of the object you copied, you get the exact same object you picked up. Simpler actions are better in that they are more predictable and less confusing. It's called "paste", it's not called "remove formatting and ...
17
There is a study on rotated text readability from University of Toronto. Although it is on tabletop displays, I think it can be applied here too. The result shows that it takes significantly less time to read clockwise (-90 degree rotated) for words in any positions of the screen. It is not clear for 6-digit number though.
17
I think you're trying to solve a readability problem the wrong way.
Line length (measure) is your real problem. The number generally advised for a readable measure is about 60-70 characters. Cut the measure to about 60% of it's current length and you'll find you have far less trouble. The other way to solve it is a bigger font size ... that would be really ...
16
I'm not going to copy everything directly, so here's a link to a discussion on IxDA.com on this exact topic. It has references to several research studies showing why left-aligned text is better. You are essentially right — it takes more work to read centered text when going from line to line. You are also more likely to lose your place because you ...
14
Lets look at the logic that why icons are used the first place. Icons make use of our "scanning" ability which is quicker than "reading".
If you put Text First then you are putting less efficient way to learn first and more efficient way later. Doesn't make sense.
Steve Krug in his book "Don't make me think" almost killed himself advocating not to use ...
13
Caps are an effective way of introducing visual hierarchy without increasing point size or using bold. All-caps can make small text seem more important or conceptually higher in the hierarchy than larger text.
Metro, being highly typographic, requires designers have a significant degree of freedom to express visual hierarchy without resorting to colour or ...
13
I would say it depends on the action of the button. When you are dealing with Calls to Action (CTA's) your primary emphasis is on communicating an action to an user as highlighted by this article about writing effective CTA's which has this to say :
The very first piece of advice in the classic book Writing Tools
encourages writers to start sentences ...
12
I believe it is in part because text in all-caps have a clear, regular rectangular shape to them regardless of the word or language, making them easier to position uniformly on any shape. That is, there are no descenders or ascenders to accommodate as there would be with lower-cased words (the position of which might vary depending on the word or language). ...
11
Just a user's perspective with no supporting research here:
If the link is a complete sentence -- that is, I'm not talking about "nested" sentences like quotes but rather full, stand-alone sentences -- then as a user I expect to see the punctuation as part of the link. The sentence is a unit; breaking it up with a </a> triggers my built-in proofreader ...
11
Don't link the period.
Google: No Links for Punctuation
If you include a URL in a Gmail messages, Google automatically links the URL. They do not include terminal periods adjacent to links, nor any other punctuation for that matter. So, full sentence links would still not link the period.
Developer Interview: Alex Hunter Trujillo
I asked one of the ...
10
The critical factor here is that the task is repetitive, so it needs to be as simple and quick as possible, with bigger target areas. I think it's a good idea to keep with lots of buttons. One vehicle, one action - nice and simple.
Move the buttons a bit further apart to avoid accidentally hitting the wrong one and make them bigger so there's less room for ...
10
I think it depends more on what elements/content the link is wrapping. In HTML5 <a> elements use a transparent content model, which means they can wrap a <p> element. Obviously, you'd include the punctuation if you're linking the entire paragraph in HTML5:
<a...>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>
</p>
But in HTML4 ...
10
Thought this was funny ... someone has already created a hack to turn the visual studio ALL CAPS Menus back into lowercase. (I realise Microsoft have said they will expose this functionality themselves... but this demonstrates someone with a level of urgency).
The point here is that many people really find ALL CAPS hard to read and/or aesthetically painful ...
10
Usually justifications for having hidden content come from a misplaced desire to reduce scrolling or to (rightly) let the user see all of the questions without getting distracted by the answer text.
There is a better way to do this: a list of questions at the top with anchor links within the page to the question and answer.
download bmml source ...
10
Having your cursor slanted would be a UX improvement over a permanently vertical cursor. Many word processors already do this. Here are some examples from MS Word:
It gives additional feedback to a user that the text they enter will be italic, and it is visually less confusing when selecting text. At the same time, I can't think of any reason that it ...
8
If you make your background colors light enough then the text can all be black...
Also, I made the numbering a darker version of the background color. The light gray numbering doesn't really work contrast-wise on anything but white. But dark red looks good on light red, for example.
8
From the author's point of view, text links are better. They encode the association between the URL and the text.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext">Hypertext</a> is cool.
(Of course, authors don't need to worry about the intricacies of HTML. The above code can be produced through a WYSIWYG editor, Markdown, etc.)
How to ...
8
Looking at their markup, the main paragraph styling of articles is #333, which is common as many feel that pure black on white is too much contrast and hard on the eyes.
The second paragraph on that sample page is actually a div outside of the proper p markup. My guess is that this is malformed markup created by a less-than-perfect CMS and/or ...
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