CRyder Design

A Brief Introduction

When searching for a good and poor example of readable web content I decided to use the article “The Start of a New Era for Responsive Web Design” by Francois Brill on the website UX Collective as a good example and the article “UX Design Has a Dirty Secret” by Tanya Snook on the website Fast Company. Both are opinion pieces on the topic of UX design. The first article talks about the development of responsive web design, and the second article talks about the struggles of user research in User Experience Design.

The Good

I consider the article  “The Start of a New Era for Responsive Web Design” to be an example of a good reading experience because it is outlined with headings and subheadings for each section that are organized chronologically. The author begins with a “How it Started” heading and section and moves on to “How it’s Going” heading and section and finishes with a “Where to Next” heading and section. By organizing the content into different sections, it makes it easier for the reader to skim the article to find the type of content they are looking to find as it is all divided by headers.

Additionally, in the good example (“The Start of a New Era for Responsive Web Design”) the paragraphs are a comfortable length for the reader, not too short but not too long. The sections are also divided into mostly equal lengths, so one is no longer than the others. Each paragraph has an idea that smoothly transitions to the next in each section.

For a more comfortable reading experience, the good example (“The Start of a New Era for Responsive Web Design”) provides pull quotes and graphics to break up the text a bit. The graphics provide a bit of assistance in portraying what the writer is talking about.

The Bad

I consider the article  “UX Design Has a Dirty Secret” to be a bad example of a good reading experience. While the good example was broken up into small sections and divided by headers, this example is just one long text with no headers other than the title. When there are no headers, some readers may choose not to read the article because it can seem to be too long. It also makes it more challenging for a reader to skim the article because they have no idea how the content is organized.

In the bad example (“UX Design Has a Dirty Secret”) some of the paragraphs are a bit long which can be uncomfortable for the reader. Because there are no sections, it is one long text which is likely to be skipped over due to loss of reader attention. As previously mentioned, the bad example (“UX Design Has a Dirty Secret”) is simply one long text with no images, no lists, and no pull quotes to break it up. The only supporting image is the hero image at the top of the post. This can cause an uncomfortable reading experience for the audience.

In Conclusion

While both examples are extremely different in several ways, they do share some similarities. Both have a background color and text color that is comfortable and very readable. Additionally, the text size is not too large and not too small, I did not find myself having to zoom in to read the text because it was too small nor scroll too much because the text was too large. They both could have also provided a bit of white space as a sort of cushion for the reader’s eyes to allow them to rest a bit between paragraphs or sections. Though they both do have some positive aspects they each represent a side in the discussion of web readability. The good and the bad.