With all of the unique mobile devices released per year, keeping up and remaining trendy can be a real challenge. What is motivating, on the other hand, is that users’ motivation remains the same: consuming content on the web.
Regardless of the devices they are using or the browser they are applying, users have a single purpose: to get access to information. Therefore, providing content and enhancing the reading experience should be the top priority for every designer, instead of complying with a particular device.
Image source: Joshua Krohn
Recently, the main focus when dealing with responsiveness is not how effective it would be, but how the layers would adapt between breakpoints. We agree that this is important, but the ultimate challenge of mobile devices is to simplify reading and working online.
The way you present content can lift you to the top or push you to the bottom. The more complicated your content is, the simpler it will be for a user to give up and browse for similar information elsewhere. Proper presentation will portray your brand and it will help customers understand the message you’re trying to send. Typography is essential for this purpose, so avoid relying completely on images. Without decent text, they will look redundant.
Typography and Fonts Usage
Image source: Piotr Adam Kwiatkowski
With the introduction of new fonts and easily accessible font services online (or an affordable purchase of a ‘steady-ready’ kit), typography is becoming more and more important.
However, designers reveal lots of aesthetic concerns when it comes to typography. The main trouble is that many of us are prone to substitute typography with proper lettering, which is not correct.
The eye-pleasant appearance of properly executed lettering can influence our perception of typefaces, since both lettering and typography commit to the same rules for applying visual concepts.
In the case of typography, however, visibility is not so essential-the eternal pursuit of the perfect typeface will distract us from paying attention to what is really important, namely the functionality of typefaces and the enormous advantages of their design systems (reusability, flexibility and versatility).
Image source: Hrvoje Grubisic
An effortlessly ‘digestive’ written material and a proper reader’s experience are achievable only through clear typography and facilitated legibility. Therefore, premature research is essential-we need to discover valuable information and to identify whit the needs of our readers.
Beware that this will require you to defocus from your own ego and to forget what YOU think is the appropriate reading material.
Image source: Jason Kirtley
A proper digital experience has to encompass all of the following elements: user; user’s context and content. You will have to take care of all of them in every design you lay hands on.
More in detail, you are expected to consider typography in every component and you will discover a bunch of assessment methods and useful guidelines that would improve the overall experience of spending time reading your content.
Content
We can all agree that content is the king of all information sources. It is a phrase introduced by Bill Gates in 1996 and a clear prediction of the importance content would gain web wide. Nowadays, the adage turned into a sea of sorts for those creating SEO strategies and guiding the content market.
Why is content so usable?
Image source: Andy Burdin
Content usability derives from the easiness with which readers engage to whatever content has been provided to them on different sites or applications. Content is considered to be fully usable to the extent to which readers can immerse in all of its facets, without feeling bored or distracted at the same time.
There are many ways to make sure that the content you’re exposing is completely usable. In order to do it, you should consider the following aspects and the impact they could have on customer’s perceptions:
Form should be equally considered as function
Image source: Hrvoje Grubisic
Content can appear in many types — images, text, video, and audio. Include all of these types on your app or website and make sure your users will be easily involved and will remain focused on the subject matter.
Every UX Designer should be aware that the effectiveness of User Experience depends on his ability to decrease the threshold of users’ engagement. Basically, the success of UX depends on whether the user is actually capable to stay sited and dive in a sea of content without being distracted.
Quality Is Usability
Image source: Dustin LaMont
We are sure that you know this. At least we think so.
The quality of writing is very important. The more pleasant your content is for readers, the more usable it will become. There is no alternative for this rule. Bad quality is absolutely useless, since users will not have the will or the time to read pointless posts.
Image source: Kultar Singh
Quality, however, doesn’t rely solemnly on text. Using multiple media is desired and recommended, but should be performed with care. The success of multiple media strategy will not be guaranteed if the engagement medium is presented in a suboptimal manner.
The will to share: ‘Trending practices’ will indicate the success of your content
One of the main reasons for the popularity of social networks is that they offer ‘content shareability’. The possibility to share a post that one likes is an unavoidable indicator of content quality.
Sharing is important because it fosters engagement with the content and it facilitates the access to it. Besides, it enables users to engage like a proper community.
Sharing content can be incentivized in many ways:
- ‘Hitting off’ with an attractive, yet informative title.
- Using social metadata tags to monitor where and how your content will spread across social networks.
- Introducing ‘Share buttons’ for various social platforms.
- If your app or website is an informative or a factual one, give users a chance to share information on spot.
- A comment hosting service is a great idea to enhance community.
Maximal usability depends on the way you style your content
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There are numerous ways to optimize the elements of your app/website and to ensure that this procedure will lead you to increased users’ engagement.
In the case of textual content, the first and most important task is to ensure your typography is usable. It means you have to make the appropriate choice among various fonts, shapes, kerning, spacing, line height and carefully chosen styles (bold and italic).
The second task would be to ensure that you have the appropriate positioning of content on the page, which would ideally conduct to engagement and readability. This means you should have no longer paragraphs than five lines and that your content should be divided in such way that the length limitation of the paragraphs will not affect the meaning.
Context
Image source: Hrvoje Grubisic
The rationale of web standards development is to build sites and applications which will ideally resemble the desired “One Web for Everyone and Everywhere”. However, mobile technology is not just about browsing the web and looking for information, so arriving to the point of universality remains difficult and questionable.
The universal approach ought to be admired, but it should not distract designers from their diversity awareness. People use their mobile devices for all aims and purposes (they make presentations, check the newest details of their friends’ lives, or even ‘kill time’ playing games on the toilet). New laptop generations and their screen real estate will move 960 DPU 30-inch desktop monitors in the shadows.
Contextual inquiry is the starting point of each user friendly product. The process consists of few important activities that aim to gather user-needs info and to apply it when building the product. Basically, context inquiry is the initial stage in product development that aims to ensure compliance between users’ expectations and our products’ features.
Generally speaking, the purpose of contextual inquiry is to expose the functions and features our users expect. The crucial part is to focus on what they need, instead of what they want. However, we should be careful with self-reported requests when building our products.
It is because users are often unable to describe their needs in a way which is precise enough to build a functional and technical set that could satisfy them. Furthermore, users may prove completely incompetent to decide on the matter, because they are not familiar with the possibilities and the restrictions of particular files and devices.
Here are some of the common means for conducting contextual inquiry:
- Monitoring users’ behavior
- Making surveys
- Affinity diagramming
- Designing User personas
- Considering Ethnography.
By employing these means and observing users respond to their needs by using your tools, you or every other UX designer will be capable of understanding the advantages and deficiencies of the created product.
The Burden of Accessibility
Dyslexia translates to a person’s disability to read properly. Dyslexic brains have different vision-they identify characters with images and they tend to modify and mirror the letters they see. Therefore, what looks like a lowercase “a” (written with a font that visually cuts the tail) to a person with no dyslexia problem, will look like an italic “e” to a person who has this condition.
People diagnosed with dyslexia will also face difficulties when reading characters in geometric typefaces. For instance, mirrored “p” becomes “q”, the same way a rotated “n” becomes “u”. An excellent, web-literate designer is not expected to switch typefaces whenever he faces this situation, but rather to be aware of the existence of this condition.
Closing thoughts
Image source: Fabio Basile
We are lucky enough to see the accelerated development of technology, which will give designers the chance to give content some ‘proper treatment’ in future. Meanwhile, they are expected to contribute to this tendency and to invest more and more time into designing readable content.
The procedure will require designers to face many obstacles, but it will also bring many new tools and industry pioneers that will guide them to increased readability.
Designers can make an even bigger contribution by directing their energy towards the creation of more adjustable methods for formatting readable content (new custom content types, columns formation, fast paragraph division, customizable templates etc) which don’t affect in anyhow their designs and layouts.
Finally, once designers and developers join their forces and start cooperating, nothing will be impossible!
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