Re: [Usability] label alignments

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 05:20:08PM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> Other than that, all the other Sun people who've expressed a preference
> to me so far are in favour of left-alignment
Generally, people without typographic experience will say that
they prefer left alignment -- this is why usability expreiments are
done, and not just interviews :-)

The reason the open look guide had text fields in the examples may be that
the other widgets were not yet developed.

That wonderful little black book on interface design goes into this
in some detail (the one with colour plate mockups of a proposed revamp
of open look).  I can try and get the book details if you don't know
which one I mean.  I think I lent my copy out.

Similarly, people without typographic experience will put headings in
all caps, underlined, not knowing that readers tend to skip such text :-)

For that matter, there have been studies on the chances of a newspaper
being read, as related to the punctuaiton in the heading.  It turned out
to be a significant factor.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001