Confusing the reader
Know-how
Confusing
the reader
by Kiron Kasbekar
Sometimes designers get carried away by their
own 'cleverness'. And, without realising it, their
'brilliant, innovative' design results in confusion.
Clearly, these are bad designers, because design
that works against good functionality and is user-unfriendly
is poor design. Now try and imagine this kind
of layout on a web page - a three-column format,
in which the text runs to the bottom of one column
and then resumes its thread at the top of the
second column, then goes right down and continues
at the top of the third column. Ridiculous?
While redesigning the website of a company in
early 2001 we actually encountered a design done
by a British design agency, in which the company's
web pages had been laid out in three-column formats!
Trying to be different? We don't know, but the
result was extremely poor readability.
One of the first things we did was throw out the three-column format. On a web page, text must begin at the top in one column and end at the bottom of the column. If you have to continue it, you must do so on another page.
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