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Brand & Identity Design Mobile Apps UI Design UX Design Web Design

5 Factors That Influence Readability and Legibility of a UI

Readability and Legibility

No matter how exciting and compelling your story is, it will not be able to create an impact on users if it isn’t presented in a clear and readable layout. People generally focus more on the content than its packaging. No doubt content is the king, but packaging plays a crucial role in determining its success. Readability and legibility are two key aspects of user experience design. To simply put – app and web users will not read your content if it doesn’t look clean, clear, and consumable. In this article, we will cover the factors that influence readability and legibility in user interfaces and why it’s important to care about them.

Readability

As the name suggests, readability is the ease of written content perception. It refers to the comprehension of the text content. It includes – the simplicity of words and sentences, ease of consuming information, and clarity of thoughts. Readability is determined by considering your website’s typeface, which takes font size, font style, line length, and line-height into account.

Legibility

Legibility is a much narrower concept than readability. It refers to how easily your audience can recognize and differentiate between individual characters in lines of copy on your website. Legibility is determined primarily by your typeface design. We can say that legibility is one of the components to fall under the bigger umbrella of readability. It is generally analyzed by examining users’ reading speed in terms of words-per-minute.

Factors Influencing Readability and Legibility

There are plenty of factors that directly impact the readability and legibility of the content. Here are the five most important ones:

1. Typography

Typography refers to the font style. There are some fonts that are easy on users’ eyes and create a delightful reading experience. On the other hand, some fonts are not so pleasing. The choice of fonts directly impacts the readability and legibility of your copy. Font size, width, color, and text structure – every single element matters. Fonts also add to the visual element, just like images. Typography in design is the art of balancing the aesthetic aspect of the text and the ability to read it quickly.

Negative space, alignment, tracking, the spacing between baselines of text, line length, etc. are all key elements to clear typography and comprehendible content. Designers must avoid too little space between the words, very less distance between the lines or letters, tiny font size, and non-contrasting text and background colors.

2. Background

Just like printed books and newspapers, the background color has a significant impact on the ability to read and comprehend the content on websites. It allows readers to distinguish both interactive elements and content. For instance, black text on white or light background appears more significant than the white text on a dark background. An improper color scheme will mostly result in reduced readability, leading to poor user experience. Relevant content or useful data that is unreadable is of no use; users will most likely not read it.

The nature of the content also plays a role in selecting the color scheme. Text-heavy interfaces aimed at reading as the main activity should use color schemes based on light backgrounds. In contrast, the image-heavy interfaces should use dark backgrounds to amplify the pictures’ performance.

3. Writing

The UX writing must be clear, concise, useful and consistent. Text is a vital part of the visual design and user experience. The best you can do with the written content on your website, app, or blog is to make it human-like communication. When you interact with your users through text, at any level, they must feel as if they are interacting with a real human being and not a bot. 

Remember – users don’t read on the web, but scan through the content. Be short and consistent in your written copy. An extended form of writing pushes off users. You must also build a solid text hierarchy so that users can quickly scan your page content. Use numbers, marked elements, and textual variants to catch attention. Marking out specific information by using bold and italic fonts, unusual text sizes, different colors, highlighting, etc. has worked well for years and still holds its significance; however, avoid overdoing it.

4. Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy refers to prioritizing the content into different levels. It is based on the Gestalt theory that deals with the psychology of visual perception of elements. The theory shows how people tend to group visual elements. It organizes UI components so that the brain could distinguish the objects based on their physical differences, such as size, color, contrast, style, etc.

As mentioned earlier, people scan content over the web. So, if we take an example of a blog, they will first notice the headline, then subheadings and only then copy blocks. This is a typical pattern. Users scan the headline and subheadings to understand if the article is interesting and useful to them. Only then will they read the entire blog. The headline and subheadings should be framed in a way that is both informative and enticing. On the other hand, if users see the vast and long sheet of text, they will be scared to read it.

To build an effective visual hierarchy, the text is divided into three levels:

  • The primary level – It includes the biggest type like in headlines. 
  • The secondary level – This is the type of element that supports scannability, such as subheaders or captions.
  • The tertiary level – This one is for the body text and additional data. 

5. White space

White space or negative space is the area of the layout that is left empty. It can be either around the objects you place in the layout or between and inside them. Negative space provides breathing space for all the objects by clearing the unwanted clutter from the page. White space is a strong tool to improve the readability of your text and thereby enhancing the user experience. It also helps in creating a connection between the text and non-text elements of a user interface. 

Many more factors influence the readability and legibility of the content of a user interface; however, these are the most important ones. If you feel like discussing them further in detail, our team of experts will be more than happy to assist you.

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Blog Design Web Design

Efficiently Using White Backgrounds in Website Design

Web Design

There were days when dark-colored themes and flashy colors were all over the internet. However, over the last few years, designers have identified the importance of blank spaces, white spaces and have been increasingly using the white color. White backgrounds have gained huge popularity these days. Gone are the dark backgrounds and patterns that have been a big part of the design process for a while. Using a white background may seem like the easiest and the safest path to a clean website design, but that’s not the case. White backgrounds need to work with both your text and image choices. They need to sync in with the overall Website Design and should not look like an afterthought. So what should designers do to best use white backgrounds? Let’s check it out.

Why Use a White Background?

Using a white background is fairly an easy way to go about designing as it is the default setting when working in HTML and CSS, however, colors did gain popularity over a period of time. White as a background color for blogs and e-commerce sites is a staple, but nowadays more and more designers are using white backgrounds for different projects which are more on the creative side. A couple of years ago, the trend was to use a black or dark-colored background, but that trend has surely flipped, and there’s not one particular reason for that.

White backgrounds have a strong correlation with Responsive designs and Flat & Minimal styling. White background regained popularity because it is easy and always looks natural. In some responsive layouts, sites lock to certain pixel-width grid stops and everything outside of those shows a background edge. With a completely white background, this edge becomes invisible without any extra design thought. Simple is still a major trend and a white background is the epitome of simple. White also makes it easy to pair and use many of the bright, bold colors that are symbolic of flat design styles.

Website Design

More About ‘White’

White is a simple color, or we can say it is the absence of color. While it has some meanings of its own, it can take on the context of its surroundings. White is the color of purity, faith, light, cleanliness, possibility, softness and generally denotes positivity. As a background color though, white is more of in a supporting role. White maintains some of its own color associations, but the hue also absorbs what is around it, allowing the full meaning of the design around it to come through. For example, when a white background is paired with pink and script typefaces, it takes on feminine attributes. White as a background color emphasizes clarity and removes visual obstacles and clutter. The hue is used to add visual emphasis to other important parts of the design like color, text or images. It is frequently a part of the overall visual aesthetic that is simply designed and minimalistic.

Other Shades of White

Other colors or words that represent hues that are white or almost white include snow, milk, ivory, pearl, paper, corn silk, seashell, linen, cream and alabaster. These include a pinch of another color, typically black, to soften white with an undertone for reading on screens. Some users and designers argue that pure white is harsh on the eye. However, in print projects, pure white is often standard.

Website Design

Tips to Use White Background

Keep it simple: The essence of white is simplicity. To create a powerful, beautiful impact, choose a simple or minimally-styled design scheme.

Create contrast: Choose dark or bright colors against the white background to create a meaningful visual impact which will entice the users. Black is the most common and preferred choice for type on a white background; even dark gray creates an almost equal impact. Black and dark gray over a white background enhances the readability and is easy on viewers’ eyes. The same goes for images as well. Select images that aren’t overly white in focus or consider using a black border around images to set them apart from the whitish background.

Use simple images: Photos, graphics and illustrations should blend smoothly within the overall design. Refrain from using complex, loud, confusing images. Use simple images which are easy to comprehend and do not stress out viewers.

Wisely choose the types: Beautiful type is of the utmost importance in a design outline where everything is simple. A visually appealing font will accentuate the simplicity of the overall design. It will help in creating a visually stunning white-based website.

Plenty of space: Remember, white backgrounds are part of an overall look and trend. Wisely use them and give plenty of room to everything that is displayed on the screen. Add extra space around objects if required, leave wider margins between text and menu items and focus on the space as much as the objects within it.

Focus on an accent color: Pick an accent color and use it against white backgrounds with black type to create a visually appealing website. The splash of colors brings focus to certain parts of the design in a more subtle way. Moreover, this works with any hue.

Conclusion

White backgrounds aren’t new, they have been around for years now. Only the way of using them has changed and opened new doors to visually enhance web designs working on white backgrounds. This can bring a modern, sleek and clean feel to almost any type of web design project. So go for it! We’d love to see what you are working on. Share your thoughts with us and discuss your design needs with our experts.