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the impact of layout

Are people reading what you write? If so, do they understand it? And are you getting the results you anticipated? If you’re not following some basic rules of design, typography and layout, chances are: they’re not, they don’t and you won’t.  

Readability is the keyword. Everything should contribute to make the content readily comprehensible. Anything detracting from readability - including fancy layouts - should be eliminated.

Designing a readable user guide. Documentation design includes not only the structural issues of the overall organization of information, but also the layout of each page. Page layout is an important aspect of readability. A page full of straight text in a small typeface is not inviting. Since many people do not like to read documentation at all, the least you can do is to ensure that each page is easy to read.

The introduction of software such as Microsoft Publisher and recent versions of Word - enabling everyone to become his own lay-outer (emphasizing "lay")- has truly been a mixed blessing. It is basically a good thing that average man can "spice up" documentation, but lack of modesty in applying graphical effects also produce an increasing amount of nightmare examples of how not to do it.

Here are a few rules to help you get your message across.

• Use a serif typeface, or...

- Serifs are the small strokes at the end of the main stroke of a letter. Opinions vary on the importance of this advise from Gutenberg's days. One research study indicated that people’s understanding of what they were reading dropped from 67 percent with a serif typeface to 12 percent with a sans serif. Other studies contradict this. Personally I believe that paragraph length is more important. Write short and concise - and use whatever typeface the layout requires.  

• Use only one or two typefaces

- Mixing several typefaces can make the job look shabby. Most typographers stick to two typefaces in a book or report. Many choose to use only one, but to use it in different sizes and weights.

• Emphasize sparingly, using bold, italics or color

- Don’t use capitals for body text - only seven percent of readers found that body text in capitals was easy to read. When the same section was reset in a serif font in lower case, 100 percent found it easy to read (David Ogilvy).

- Use bold sparingly. When much of the body text is set in bold, readers complain of eye fatigue. Besides, too much emphasis leads the audience to ignore the whole passage.

• Proportion & balance

You will often be required to work within a fixed space determined by e.g. the proportions of the retail box, the product is sold in. Obviously the user guide cannot be larger than the sales package, but it is often also significantly smaller thanks to the marketing guys. Even the smallest publication though, must obey the rules of proportion and balance, but the technical writer must always remember that he is the conveyor of information, not an art director with the sole goal to impress other art directors. Use your intuition and if you crave formal rules, read about them here.

• The importance of white space. 

Don't feel that you have to fill every square inch with text or graphics. White space give the eyes a rest and contributes much to readability. Large margins, spaces between sections, and easy-to-read fonts are factors to consider. You should design each page to be pleasing to the eye. Trying to fit as much information as possible on each page will wear your reader out and does not enhance the learning process.

• Be careful how you use boxes, shading, etc.

- There’s some evidence that boxes do not provide the intended emphasis. Apparently, modern readers tend to ignore anything printed in a box. Probably, this developed from our habit of ignoring advertising in newspapers and magazines. Boxes can be useful however, for additional and supporting information.

- Shading has the same effect as a box, in discouraging readers from considering the contents as part of the body text. Shading also reduces legibility and should only - if at all - be used in headings.

• Avoid reversed text

- David Ogilvy, the advertising guru, says that body text should never be set in reverse. He says, that it used to be "- believed these devices forced people to read the text; now we know that they make reading physically impossible".  

• Headings are helpful. 

You must decide how your layout will handle headings, tables, sample screens, warning messages, shortcut tips, etc. Each of these elements gives you the opportunity to increase readability by adding variety and interest to your document. Make sure you have lots of headings to help steer readers to the information they need. Large margins can be used for short descriptive headings or shortcut tips. (Be sure you still leave plenty of "white space.") To highlight warnings or hints you may want to use italics or put the text in a box. You can insert sample screens that relate to the text which will help you explain a feature and increase the visual appeal of your pages.

• Break up long documents using subheadings

- 78 percent of those surveyed in one study said that they found subheadings useful, especially in long documents.

• Suit size of type and line to the page

- The size of the letter depends on the age and reading level of the audience, and the length of the line. Most people find it easy to read type within the range 10 point on an 11 point base to 12 point on a 14 point base. The base measurement is the distance between the base of a letter and the base of one in the line immediately below.

- Line length should be no less than 40 characters and no more than 60. This can be awkward on an A4 page. To keep the type size within the recommended ranges, you’ll need two columns or very wide margins.

• Align left

- Left alignment increases comprehensibility, and is preferred by the majority of readers from a wide range of backgrounds. Keep right ragged. Text set ragged left, or following a curved margin, as used in many advertisements, is hard to read, and most people don’t bother.

• Let the text go with the flow

- In the western world, we start reading from the top left hand corner and work our way across each line, down to the next line and continue until we reach the bottom right hand corner. Reading gravity, then, is the entrenched habit of reading from the top left across and down the page to the bottom right. Ignoring the reading gravity principle reduces comprehensibility by nearly 50 percent.

Therefore, headings and subheadings should always come before the text they refer to - just above, or just to the left. Similarly, the best place for graphics, charts and tables is embedded in the text, adjacent to the text that refers to them.  

• Illustrations must support the text

- The marketing department will often be liable to present you to a bunch of old promo photos of the product to illustrate your user guide. No good, the guide is not to be "illustrated" at all. Photos and illustrations are to be informative, to support the written information, and in most cases, they must be created to the specific task.

• Create a design manual. 

Once you decide how to format each of these elements, make sure you write a document specification to record your decisions. Other design considerations include numbering of tables and sample screens, deciding on page headers and footers, and distinguishing user input from system prompts. You should include all of these in your specifications.  

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Writing for the Internet is a somewhat different task. Read about it here.