Use bigger user-interface text

Panos Sakalakis

Most categories of software, and business software especially, primarily feature textual and numerical information. Unfortunately, for too many people, too much of the time, software user interfaces use tiny text that people can’t read.

User experience (UX) designers defend software against usability problems, such as illegible tiny text. But several factors conspire against them.

Perfect eyesight

Designers in their twenties with perfect eyesight tolerate tiny text because it works just as well as conventional text sizes. For them, at least. And even if they don’t intend to use tiny text, they get there when they have a smaller default text size than other people, and define other sizes relative to it.

The rest of us probably look back fondly to previous decades, before we ended up with imperfectly-corrected visual impairment, and squinting at small monitors.

Fancy monitors

Designers, like all professionals, prefer to work with good tools. This means monitors with high-resolution, high-contrast, and colour-accurate displays. In these environments, and with limited ambient lighting, they can indeed read text at small sizes.

The rest of us probably put up with cheap monitors, with scaled resolutions or lower DPI that make fonts appear less sharp, in bad lighting conditions.

Whitespace

Design fashion consistently favours generous use of whitespace: large margins and increased line-spacing. This makes layouts look elegant and balanced, at the cost of reducing the available space for text. Unless you make it smaller, of course.

The rest of us do half our work in inelegant spreadsheets that cram as much text as possible on the screen. We appreciate elegance as much as anyone else, but we value information density more.

Complicated layout

Complicated page layouts look cool, and probably offer more interesting design challenges than a single column of text. Low resolutions and small displays don’t always leave enough room for interesting layouts, unless you shrink everything.

The rest of us care so little about complex layouts that we happily read web pages in Safari’s Reader mode. Some of us even like page after page of walls of text, in novels.

Someone else’s design

Unfortunately for UX designers, who I don’t blame for any of this, they often share content design with other people. When someone else writes the user-interface text, I wonder how designers can make it part of their own work. Meanwhile, when a designer really doesn’t care about the text, their designs say lorum ipsum dolor. The latin word dolor means pain.

The rest of us, of course, experience software as a single design, and typically rely on successfully reading the text as much as we rely on successfully clicking the right buttons.

And worse

A designer can do worse than making text too small to read. Low-contrast text simulates smaller text, by making it less prominent. Light font weights, intended for large font sizes, reduce body text pixel count and legibility, punishing users for having high-resolution displays. And, in case they can still read it, the user-interface layout will truncate text after the first few characters.

The rest of us remain grateful for working with good designers on our own software development teams. Designers who remain aware of differences between their own situation and other people’s. Designers whose usability testing uncovers unexpected failure modes. Designers who adopt the WCAG guidelines. Designers with empathy.