Font Size and Usability

usable trumps pretty

[tedster]

I was recently discussing Jakob Nielsen, the usability authority, with some folks, and one of them mentioned that his site, useit.com, is pretty ugly.

I agree that Jakob's site is pretty ugly. But some of the companies he's consulted for have great sites. He's just not into pretty.

Along these lines, one of my clients fell in with a moderator at About.com. This moderator suggested bumping up the font size on the client's site, and my client naturally considered this to be the absolute Gospel, coming from such an esteemed web personality. So they demanded that I make the change.

Well, I was very resistant. It meant the smallest font would be the browser default size, and some of the headings would come in at +2. That makes for a pretty graceless page, especially because this is a legacy site, designed for 640x480. But the customer is always right, so I complied, agreeing that we would watch the logs and revert if it hurt business.

Well, now I'm eating crow. Conversions went up immediately and they stayed up. It seems that easily readable fonts (this site has an older demographic) are an important part of usable, even if they are a bit clunky! People don't care about "pretty" nearly so much as they care about "usable."

[ancarett]

Hehehe, crow gets kind of tasty after a while. I know that from my own experience.

Understanding your target sites demographic is a challenge. If at all possible, it is great to run some sort of focus group or test marketing, even if it is amateurish. Often the feedback you get astounds me.

For instance, worked on a redesign of a user login/tool info page. Sweated bullets for weeks over the look/feel/format. Major complaint after the launch? Users couldn't find the login area (we'd moved it from top center to top right hand side). Ugh! Definitely NOT the effect we wanted.

I believe if we had run the page (even removing the company logo and proprietary information) past a focus group, we would have saved ourselves a lot of grief.

[Eric_Jarvis]

the thing that set me on the course of usability first was noticing the sites people would ask about on newsgroups and in chat...plenty of people would announce "I've found such and such a site and it's really cool"...and I'd go look and see something pretty

but sometimes somebody would ask "what was the URL of the site so and so was talking about last month"...and when it got posted I'd go look and usually see something simple, easily usable and effective

in most businesses the key is return visits

[mivox]

I generally try to design my sites so that they'll at least function at a larger font size... some of them even look OK. ;) But I don't see any reason why, if you plan things in advance, you can't have both a usable and good-looking site.

I recently had a client tell me repeatedly to increase the font size on a site, while she watched me work on it on my 800x600 home Macintosh (which generally displays fonts smaller than a Windows machine would)...

I kept showing her the browser preview with the fonts bumped up to 'largest' and the browser window shrunk to around 640, saying, "You have to keep in mind, the site will look like this to some people," and she said that was fine.... until she got back to her own office, and looked at the site on her own Windows machine with a large default font size, and a 640x480 monitor.

Then she emailed me, asking if I could make the text smaller.

[txbakers]

My wife is the ultimate arbiter for me when it comes to useability. Definitely NOT a geek, but an average web user, she lets me have it if something I design is not first and foremost usable.

[agerhart]

I would think that a man that has built his career around usability would have a site that looks okay in all browsers. This is what one of his pages looked like in Opera [topsitelistings.com]

[mivox]

LOL.... very usable. ;)

[agerhart]

Yeah, I thought so!