{"rowid": 81, "title": "Science!", "contents": "Sometimes we want to capture people\u2019s attention at a glance to communicate something fast. At other times we want to have the interface fade away into the background, letting people paint pictures in their minds with our words (if you\u2019ll forgive a little flowery festive flourish).\n\nI tend to distinguish between these two broad objectives as designing for impact on the one hand, and designing for immersion on the other. What defines them is interruption. Impact needs an attention-grabbing interruption. Immersion requires us to remove interruption from the interface. Careful design deliberately interrupts but doesn\u2019t accidentally disrupt. If that seems to make sense to you, then you\u2019ll find the following snippets of science as useful as I did.\n\nSaccades and fixations\n\nAs you\u2019re reading this your eyes are skipping along the lines in tiny jumps. During each jump everything is blurred. Each jump ends in a small pause so your brain can take a snapshot of the letters. It arranges them into words, and then parses out the meaning \u2014 fast \u2014 in around a quarter of a second.\n\nThe jumps are called saccades. The pauses are called fixations. Sometimes we take regressive saccades, skipping back to reread. There\u2019s a simple example in the excellent little book, Detail in Typography, by Jost Hochuli.\n\n\n\nIf you want to explore the science of reading in much more depth, I recommend the excellent paper, \u201cThe Science of Word Recognition\u201d, by Dr Kevin Larson of Microsoft.\n\nTo design for legibility and readability is to design for saccades and fixations. It\u2019s the craft of making it easy for people\u2019s brains to extract meaning, using techniques like good contrast, font size, spacing and structure, and only interrupting the reading experience deliberately.\n\nScan paths\n\nAt some point when visiting 24 ways you probably scanned the screen to get orientated. The journey your eyes took is known as a scan path. Scan paths are made up of saccades and fixations. Right now you\u2019re following a scan path as you read, along one line, and down to the next. This is a map of the scan paths found by Olivier Le Meur from observing people looking at Rembrandt\u2019s Le\u00e7on d\u2019anatomie:\n\n\n\nFor websites, the scan path is a little different. This is an aggregate scan path of Google from LC Technologies:\n\n\n\nThe average shape of a website scan path becomes clearer in this average scan path taken by forty-six people during research by the Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools:\n\n\n\nJust like when we read text arranged left to right in a vertical column, scan paths follow a roughly Z-shaped pattern from the top left to bottom right. Sometimes we skip back to reread a word or sentence, or glance again at a specific element, but the Z-shaped scan path persists.\n\nDesigning for scan paths is to organise content to help people move through an interface to get orientated, and to read.\n\nThe elements that are important enough to need impact must interrupt the scan path and clearly call attention to themselves. However, they don\u2019t always need to clip people round the ear from multiple directions at once to get attention. It helps to list elements by importance. That gives us an interruption hierarchy to work with. Elements can then interrupt the design with degrees of contrast to the rest of the content using either positioning, treatment, or both. Ta-da! Impact achieved, but gently. No clips round the ear required.\n\nSwinging mood\n\nHuman beings are resilient. Among the immersion and occasional interruptions, we even like a little disruption, especially if it\u2019s absurd and funny. The Ling\u2019s Cars website proves it. In fact, we\u2019re so resilient that we can work around all kinds of mayhem to get a seemingly simple task done.\n\nIn one study, \u201cThe Aesthetics of Reading\u201d (PDF, 480Kb), Dr Kevin Larson of Microsoft and Dr Rosalind Picard of MIT explored the effect of good typography on mood. Two versions of the New Yorker ePeriodical were created. One was typeset well and the other poorly.\n\n\n\nThey engaged twenty volunteers \u2014 half male, half female \u2014 and showed the good version to half of the participants. The other half saw the poor version.\n\nThe good doctors found that, \u201cthere are important differences between good and poor typography that appear to have little effect on common performance measures such as reading speed and comprehension.\u201d In short, good typography didn\u2019t help people read faster or comprehend better.\n\nOh. On the face of it that seems to invalidate what we designers do. Hold your horses, though! They also found that \u201cthe participants who received the good typography performed better on relative subjective duration and on certain cognitive tasks\u201d, and that \u201cgood typography induces a good mood.\u201d\n\nThis means that even though there were no actual differences in reading speed and comprehension, the people who read the version with good typography thought that it took less time to read, and were induced into a good mood by doing so. Not only that, but by being in a good mood, people were more capable of completing creative tasks faster.\n\nThat was a revelation to me. It means that the study showed there is a positive, measurable, emotional and perceptual benefit to good typography and design. To paraphrase: time and tasks fly when you\u2019re having fun!\n\n\n\nSource: Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands: Cheering man after the first goal, Netherlands vs. Belgium, Amsterdam, 1931.\n\nSo, among all my talk of saccades, fixations, scan paths and typesetting, there is science, and the science helps us qualify our design decisions when we need to, and do our jobs better. The science helps us understand how people will interact with our work, and what the actual benefits are for them, and the products or organisations we serve. Good design equals a subjectively quicker experience, a good mood, objectively faster completion of tasks, and happiness for everyone. Thank you, science!", "year": "2012", "author": "Jon Tan", "author_slug": "jontan", "published": "2012-12-24T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2012/science/", "topic": "design"}
{"rowid": 108, "title": "A Festive Type Folly", "contents": "\u2018Tis the season to be jolly, so the carol singers tell us. At 24 ways, we\u2019re keeping alive another British tradition that includes the odd faux-Greco-Roman building dotted around the British countryside, Tower Bridge built in 1894, and your Dad\u2019s Christmas jumper with the dancing reindeer motif. \u2018Tis the season of the folly!\n\n \n 24 Ways to impress your friends\n \n\nThe example is not an image, just text. You may wish to see a screenshot in Safari to compare with your own operating system and browser rendering.\n\nLike all follies this is an embellishment\u200a\u2014\u200aa bit of web typography fun. It\u2019s similar to the masthead text at my place, but it\u2019s also a hyperlink. Unlike the architectural follies of the past, no child labour was used to fund or build it, just some HTML flavoured with CSS, and a heavy dose of Times New Roman. Why Times New Roman, you ask? Well, after a few wasted hours experimenting with heaps of typefaces, seeking an elusive consistency of positioning and rendering across platforms, it proved to be the most consistent. Who\u2019d\u2018a thought? To make things more interesting, I wanted to use a traditional scale and make the whole thing elastic by using relative lengths that would react to a person\u2019s font size. So, to the meat of this festive frippery:\n\nThere are three things we rely on to create this indulgence:\n\n\n\tDescendant selectors\n\tAbsolute positioning\n\tInheritance\n\n\nHTML & Descendant Selectors\n\nThe markup for the folly might seem complex at first glance. To semantics pedants and purists it may seem outrageous. If that\u2019s you, read on at your peril! Here it is with lots of whitespace:\n\n\n\nWhy so much markup? Well, we want to individually style many of the glyphs. By nesting the elements, we can pick out the bits we need as descendant selectors.\n\nTo retain a smidgen of semantics, the text is wrapped in