Making Text Hierarchy Clearer to Analyze

Some time ago Rogier wrote about his Chinese girlfriend being able to navigate through a site without knowing what is written (read it here). I thought it was quite helpful but at the time I couldn’t see how it would aid me in designing user friendly interfaces. Then, on Wednesday in the Interaction Design class Mr Boekbinder navigated to the Korean Philips site to illustrate how text are just being translated for location and how other content (images) is being ignored. This, however is a post on it’s own. Anyway, as I sat there looking at the site it was pretty clear to me where to click, so the hierarchy was very evident, even though I didn’t understand a word of what was being written on the site. It immediately reminded me about Rogier’s post. So, I thought, how can I apply this to my own work? Well, simply change the character set to webdings or any other character based font that isn’t readable! Simple as that. That way you are presented with an interface that you can’t read but it gives you the opportunity to analyze it without clouding your judgment with written text and thereby increasing the usability.

technorati tags:usability, hierarchy

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