April 03, 2004

Usability: Let's use color

John Gruber has this read-worthy piece: Ronco Spray-On Usability.

I myself have been thinking more about usability. Specifically, when will we learn how to improve the usability of our documents? Many of us read and write technical documents at work. What's surprising to me is how few technical documents make good use of color. Color is great for improving useability -- or, should I say, readability. That's why we all use programming editors that have syntax highlighting.

But most of the technical documents we read are just plain black and white, even when source-code-like content is included. Sure, we still print on black and white laser printers. (In fact, they are grey-scale printers.) But most color documents print just fine on those laser printers. If we use color, we can get better readability on the screen, and we lose nothing when we read hard copy.

We have been using bold, italic, and underlining for a long time. The use of styled text has certainly improved readability. But color is away better. For improving readability, color can be used much more effectively that non-color style effects.

I think what we need are just a few good examples for others to imitate. It would be easy to abuse color -- to make something so gaudy that others scoff. We just need a handful of good color schemes to choose from. A few Microsoft Word or OpenOffice templates with carefully designed styles would be enough. For those who strive to be innovators, there is a lot of room for innovation in document usability.

Here are just a few suggestions worth considering:

  • Use a conservative color -- like a dark blue -- for section titles.
  • Use color -- perhaps a highlighting background color -- to call the reader's attention to the most important sentences. You might be surprised at how well this can improve readability. When all sentences are not treated equally, your eyes can speed through the pages very quickly.
  • Use syntax highlighting for sections that contain content that resembles source code. A good example of where I think this syntax highlighting is important is the interface document that includes XML. There's nothing built-in to Microsoft Word. But you can use various tools that convert source code to HTML, and you can paste in the HTML.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 3, 2004 08:59 AM