UX for Beginners

Chapter 81. Readability

If you were some other kind of designer, this lesson might be called Typography. But since you’re a UX designer, let’s talk about how you should treat type for maximum effectiveness.

Forget About Choosing Serif or Sans Serif

In UX, you don’t care. Even Comic Sans is acceptable, technically, although I wouldn’t fight for it if I were you.

Readability is the word for the “usability” of big blocks of text. Long Wikipedia articles, lists of Google search results, your manifesto about miniature donkeys—that sort of thing.

When other kinds of designers are looking at fonts and typography, they should be choosing what tone and style those typefaces create in the design. They obviously want people to be able to read the text, as well, but it isn’t necessarily the first concern.

On a bottle of Absolut Vodka, for example, the fancy script is a little hard to read, but it looks “fancy,” which is what the designer wanted most. A UX designer would have had a panic attack about the idea of writing a whole paragraph in that script, but they did it anyway, because readability wasn’t their main concern.

On the other hand, if you are a news site, writing your articles in a fancy script is probably a great way to get death threats and go bankrupt.

That’s where UX comes in.

Readability Is a Combination of Things

Depending on your design, various things might help. The person doing the typography will be a great resource, as well, since they spend a lot of their time playing with text. ...