Well thought heading design

Have you ever read a news article or a blog when you were in a hurry or very tired? Did it happen to you that you skipped words or read something completely different than the written text? These things happen to me quite often, as I lack the time to read carefully.
Recently something similar occurred to me on the Google Apps for businesses website. I was tired and I misread the title "More than two million businesses run Google Apps" as "More businesses than two million businesses run Google Apps".
Look at the screenshot and think about the flow of the words and how they impacted your reading.

My eyes slipped from the first line to the second and then (the brain) corrected the mistake and returned to reading the first line, followed by the second, like like I am used to. Maybe textbooks would be easier to read if they weren't linear?
The interesting part is that I quickly skipped to the second line, more precisely to the word "businesses". Why? The word "businesses" stands out quite a bit from the heading because it is a long word compared to the words surrounding it ("more", "than", "two", "run").
If I blur the image it becomes more apparent which words stand out the most:

I don't think I would commit the same mistake if the heading was in one line. Therefore, it is important to be careful when using multi-line headings and text in general and always make sure that the reading flow is linear.

Comments

Basic cell counting and segmentation in Matlab

Counting cells manually is a tedious error prone process for humans. Given a large data set of microscopy images this task can be achieved much faster by means of basic computer vision techniques. In this tutorial we will segment cells from an image following a method similar to the one presented by Yongming Chen in 1999. The method uses basic morphological operations and the watershed algorithm to segment the cells. Nowadays better methods for cell segmentation exist. This method was chosen for its simplicity and ease of implementation. We start with an image of cell-like structures by Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis and Virginia E Papaioannou . A = imread('cells.jpg'); We convert the image to grayscale: I = rgb2gray(A); To be able to extract the dimmer cells, it is necessary to perform some local contrast adjustments I = adapthisteq(I); Objects on the borders can be caused by noise and other artifacts. We can eliminate objects on the borders...

The Increased Addictiveness of Today's Video Games

This is a guest post by Miles Walker, a freelance writer and blogger who usually compares car insurance deals over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org. His most recent review looked at the best car insurance quotes . Video games have always held some addiction, but now more than ever that addiction is growing. People are spending more time than ever playing the games, and game designers are constantly finding new ways keep it that way. Their efforts have a been a complete success, and some games have true addicts, addicts who play 24 hours a week or more. Visual enhancements Video games have come a long way since a certain duo of Italian plumbers started showing up in people's houses in the late 1980s. By leaps and bounds, video game graphics have become alarmingly sophisticated. Each graphical improvement increased a game's possibilities and added more depth to video games. Designers began thriving on this depth, making games with more achievements, unlocks, lev...

A more confusing Internet with .brand TLDs

A few months ago, I wrote a post proposing to remove top level domains from the internet, as many people don't understand why we need TLDs. At the time I didn't know either. Removing TLDs would simplify browsing an possibly increase security by reducing phishing sites that make use of URL similarity to gain visits to potentially dangerous websites, or sites filled with ads. The ICANN, the body that manages Internet names, has for years been preparing something different but that produces a slightly similar effect than removing TLDs: allowing brands to register their own TLDs . The proposal may soon be approved has been approved . Brands would therefore be able to register their own TLDs. Google could register .google a potentially powerful TLD for their services, like Google Maps: maps.google instead of maps.google.com. Brand TLD don't improve short urls like google.com, but seem to be effective for use in subdomains. Registering a .<brand-name> TLD will cost...

Ideas, thoughts and solutions

Search This Blog