Design UI for Recognition More than for Reading
“Your brain,” James Montalbano concluded, “knows the shape of the word.”
James Montalbano, a typographic designer, knows that legible is good, but recognizable is better. He worked on the Clearview font which has become an official alternate for Federal Highway signs. It is a high pressure reading situation to be sure. The 500 miliseconds to 1 sec it can take to read a highway sign at 70 mph can translate into up to 30 meters. Most drivers, rather than risking such a relatively huge amount of time, don’t ‘read’ signs as much as glance at them. And in recognition speed and distance terms, mixing letter case can contribute to half the time needed and twice the distance.
It isn’t unusual to get in discussions around the finer points of UI: typography of navigation & labels. Should they be all caps? Just icons? Icons with labels?
Of the main cognitive forces at play in UI, interaction and information design, recognition is one of the most powerful and mystical. It even has the word “cognition” in it.
Some working principles about recognition I have found particularly useful when considering navigation and labels:
- gestalt perception (recognition of a ‘whole’) precedes all processing
- recognition is nearly instantaneous
- recognition is easy
- we create chunks of meaning even before we understand them
- recognition happens at the focus of attention
With these principles in mind, some design decisions would include making the navigation labels glance-able (mixed case, dissimilar labels, clear font weight). Other choices that support recognition are ones that ensure location persistence; much of what people use in recognition is its position.
Form labels in particular can benefit from being mixed case and from being as distinct in their wording as possible. For example, beginning each placeholder text with the same phrase (see above) may seem obvious and even verbose, but for users who are mostly just glancing, it becomes a block to recognition, forcing them to read.
The Experience Principles I and my team hold dear, that our decisions allow for Kind, Human and Stable experiences, are supported importantly by our making design decisions that work with rather than against how their minds work.
