Anyone who is going to disagree with the article before having finished it. Please do yourself a favor and do read the "wrapping up" section before you reply. I feel like half of the responses I expect will be posted here will be covered by it.
The author did a good job articulating something I have noticed as well.
My personal pet peeve which very much is related to this is readability. Typography and typesetting are not obscure crafts that are poorly understood. They have decades of research behind them and generally are not even that difficult to implement following some ground rules. Like using sans-serif fonts* for larger blocks of text, having a line length of around 60 characters, balancing line height and making sure the text contrasts well with the background.
Yet many people seem hell-bent on reinventing the wheel there as well. Resulting in a plethora of blogs, knowledge documents, etc. out there with valuable information in a less than ideal format.
Which is why I am happy to see that the person writing about the decline of Usability has done all of these things right. Which made this a very pleasant reading experience :)
As a last note, I don't think readability was always better in the past. Certainly not when you take personal websites into consideration (I still remember the starry sky background Geocities pages). But for a while it did seem that most people were in agreement over readability and most blogs, news articles, etc did follow the basic principles I outlined.
I, too, might be old and angry.
* No, monospaced fonts are not better for readability. They might look cooler on your tech blog, and many people who spend many hours in IDEs might have not an issue with them, but when you are targeting any audience slightly larger than developers you should reconsider. There is some nuance here, for people with dyslexia monospaced fonts might actually work better. A serif font on modern high density displays also does not impact readability, however even today everyone will always read your text on a high density display. So overall, sans-serif is still the best choice to offer readability to the widest range of people.
Edit:
For anyone who wants to know a bit more than just my unsourced statements. For a modern deep dive into fonts and readability, I recently came across this medium post which does a pretty good job tackling the font type: https://medium.com/@pvermaer/down-the-font-legibility-rabbit...
Comments
Anyone who is going to disagree with the article before having finished it. Please do yourself a favor and do read the "wrapping up" section before you reply. I feel like half of the responses I expect will be posted here will be covered by it.
The author did a good job articulating something I have noticed as well.
My personal pet peeve which very much is related to this is readability. Typography and typesetting are not obscure crafts that are poorly understood. They have decades of research behind them and generally are not even that difficult to implement following some ground rules. Like using sans-serif fonts* for larger blocks of text, having a line length of around 60 characters, balancing line height and making sure the text contrasts well with the background.
Yet many people seem hell-bent on reinventing the wheel there as well. Resulting in a plethora of blogs, knowledge documents, etc. out there with valuable information in a less than ideal format.
Which is why I am happy to see that the person writing about the decline of Usability has done all of these things right. Which made this a very pleasant reading experience :)
As a last note, I don't think readability was always better in the past. Certainly not when you take personal websites into consideration (I still remember the starry sky background Geocities pages). But for a while it did seem that most people were in agreement over readability and most blogs, news articles, etc did follow the basic principles I outlined.
I, too, might be old and angry.
* No, monospaced fonts are not better for readability. They might look cooler on your tech blog, and many people who spend many hours in IDEs might have not an issue with them, but when you are targeting any audience slightly larger than developers you should reconsider. There is some nuance here, for people with dyslexia monospaced fonts might actually work better. A serif font on modern high density displays also does not impact readability, however even today everyone will always read your text on a high density display. So overall, sans-serif is still the best choice to offer readability to the widest range of people.
Edit: For anyone who wants to know a bit more than just my unsourced statements. For a modern deep dive into fonts and readability, I recently came across this medium post which does a pretty good job tackling the font type: https://medium.com/@pvermaer/down-the-font-legibility-rabbit...