[The Shame] - bolden.nl

Readability is not a smoothly linear process. Your eyes do not follow lines of text linearly, but they focus on a specific word or a set of words at a time (called fixation). They even go through abrupt jumps when go to the next line or paragraph (called saccades). Due to this non-linear nature of reading, the alignment, color, and font style of a text all play important roles on readability. In this perspective the first example shows terrible readability as it overlapped two text, making users have no idea what the texts are. An user will take several dozens of seconds (which is huge!) to understand. Although you may try this for aesthetic reason it critically harms the learnability and the efficiency of your website, and most importantly user's ability to achieve his core tasks.

[The Fame] - Google

Google provides good readability through simplicity, alignment and visual contrast. First, they keep their page design simple so that user can focus on their primary task, which is to find right article. The page only has essential component. It even show the first part of the articles, providing more spaceing but still providing information scent. Alignment sectionalizes each articles and keeps them seperate so that user can easily see which texts are together contextually. Title, links, urls are differentiated with visual contrast (especially color and font-size). It is better to keep your design simple and organized to improve readability; then, eventually that will also improve the overall design and aesthetical quality of your website.

[The Shame] - Parking sign in New York

Keeping information organized is neccessary for learnability and efficiency. It is especially important when the information is related to schedules or rules. The examples at the left both tried to represent parking schedule. The first schedule sign is terribly designed because it only use text to represent its information. Users have to consider multiple conditions simultaneouly, and most importantly it distracts user's attention.

[The Fame] - New parking sign in Los Angeles

On the other hand, the second schedule sign reorganized the text infromation and represented it as a graph. With graphical representation, you can get benefits from color, alignment, visual contrasts, etc. These helps to improve your learnability and efficiency because users can understand the overall picture more clearly and they do not require to process the imformation in their brain; users do not have to remember each details to organize. So, whenever possible, try to represent information with visual cues rather than text.

[The Shame] - Bulk Rename Utility

Developers always dream about having many functionalities. This dream went to far in this UI example. On the form window where an user has to type inputs, there are too many blanks to fill in. It even confuses the user where to start filling the form. This UI is terribly designed as it provides too much information to an user to follow. Although the inputs are grouped into certain categories (like "Remove", "Add", "Auto Date"...), the UI represents all of these at once, making users tired. This UI would have been better if it showed categories one by one on the screen so that user can focus on a certain task. Alignment and use of sections will make the design look more organized and easily recognizable. Lastly, use of visual contrast through color would have been greatly helpful to differentiate categories.

[The Fame] - Microsoft Word

Microsoft did a great job for keeping many functionalities while keeping them organized and simple. They first categorized their functionalities according to their similarities or connections in task, and they presented one by one so that an user can focus on a specific task. Even within the categories, functions are further sectionalized so that an user can easily find what he needs. The use of icons also helps this. It is good to provide as many functionalities as possible; however, those should be presented in a way that users can digest all of them without any difficulties. Sometimes it is neccessary to hide what you have at the backend, and show only small portion to let users focus on it.