Cognition and design-understanding the rules of uidesign (4) reading is not natural

Our brains are designed for language rather than reading.

Speaking and understanding verbal language is a natural human activity, but reading is not. In the process of human evolution, the neural structure required by verbal language is gradually formed, and the result is that ordinary people are in early childhood, you can learn the language in your environment without any system training. While reading is not, our brain does not show any special natural reading ability. Reading is actually a kind of artificial ability, obtained through system training. Because the human brain is not designed to be able to learn from the village by nature, because if the dependent person does not read aloud for the child, or the child does not receive proper reading guidance in the school, they may never learn to read, but, in comparison, few never learn a verbal language.

Learning to read is to train our brains (including visual systems) to recognize patterns. The brain needs to learn to recognize these patterns at a low to high level.

1. Lines, outlines, and shapes (these are basic visual features that can be recognized by the brain on the first day without learning)

2. The combination of basic visual features, such as the characters we know: letters, numbers, and other standard symbols

3. In pinyin text, characters are formed in the form of word elements. We recognize them as small pieces of meaning. For example, farm, tax,-ed, and-ing are English words.

4. Word elements merge to form what we call words. For example, farmed, farming, and taxed.

5. Words form the phrases, idioms, and statements we have learned.

6. Statement Composition Section

 

Whether reading is feature-driven or context-driven

There are two reading modes: feature-driven and context-driven.

When feature-driven reading, the visual system starts from identifying simple features, such as a line segment in a certain direction on a paper or screen or an arc of a rounded corner, and then combines them into more complex features, such as the angle, multiple arcs, shapes, and patterns. Then the brain recognizes certain shapes as characters or symbols, which represent letters, numbers, or words in ideographic words. In pinyin, different letter groups are perceived as elements and words. In all words, word sequences are understood as phrases, sentences, and paragraphs with meanings.

Feature-driven reading is sometimes called "bottom-up" or "non-contextual ". The brain is born with the ability to recognize basic features such as lines, sides, and corners. On the contrary, the ability to recognize elements, words, and phrases needs to be learned. This process can become unconscious after adequate training, starting from non-automatic and conscious analysis of letters, terminologies, and words. Obviously, the more familiar a word is, the more unconscious it is to recognize it. Especially in ideographic characters with many times of symbols such as Chinese characters, people often need more time to become skilled readers.

Context-driven or top-down reading and feature-driven reading are parallel, but the operation is the opposite. context-driven reading ranges from the purpose of a complete sentence or paragraph to words and characters. The visual system starts from recognizing the upper-level mode or knowing the meaning of the text in advance, and then uses the prior understanding of the text content to find out or guess what each component of the upper-level mode should be. Context reading cannot completely become an unconscious reading, because the patterns and contexts of most phrase and statement layers cannot appear frequently to form a specific neural trigger model. However, there are still some examples, such as idioms.

Q: Are you familiar with reading from the bottom up or from the top down? Or are neither of them dominant? Which method is better?

Experimental research has proved that the most effective reading method is non-contextual, bottom-up feature-driven, which requires a good grasp of the level of ignorance. Although reading in parallel with feature reading, context-driven reading is now considered an alternative method, it works only when feature reading is difficult or does not reach an unconscious level.

Skilled readers may turn to context-based reading when feature-based reading is disturbed by poor information display methods.

For less skilled readers, feature-based reading is not unconscious, but conscious and laborious. Therefore, most of their reading uses context-based methods. Context-based and non-unintentional feature-based reading consumes short-term awareness, leading to a lack of understanding of the content. They had to focus on interpreting a string of words, so they didn't have more energy to build the meaning of statements and paragraphs. This is why the readers of poor reading can read a piece of text aloud, but they do not know what they actually read.

Experiments have proved that you are proficient in reading and not skilled in reading different parts of the brain.

 

Poor information design affects reading

Poor writing or display reduces the unintentional and non-contextual reading of skilled readers to conscious context-based reading, which increases the burden of memory and reduces reading speed and comprehension. For unskilled readers, poor text design may block reading.

There are mainly the following situations:

Uncommon and unfamiliar words

An unfamiliar word is a computer term. For example, an enterprise internal applicationProgramThe following error message is displayed when the user tries again after 15 minutes of being idle:

Your session has expired. Please authenticate again.

Even skilled readers may not recognize these terms in the unconscious reading process. In fact, their brains need to use non-unintentional processing methods, such as using the pronunciation of each part of a word, the context of a word, or searching for a dictionary to understand the meaning of a word.

Unrecognizable writing and Fonts

Tiny font

Text in a noisy background

The visual noise around the text can interfere with the recognition of features, characters and words, so that we can exit the feature-based unconscious reading mode and enter the conscious context-based reading mode. Visual noise generally comes from the designer's placement of text on a pictorial background, or the contrast between the text and the background is too small.

Sometimes, the designer intentionally makes the text difficult to read. For example, when displaying the verification code, it intentionally adds some visual noise.

Information is drowned by repeated information

Visual noise can also come from the text itself. If there are a lot of repeated content in multiple consecutive texts, the reader receives too little feedback and does not know which row he is reading. In addition, this makes it difficult to extract important information from it.

Align text

In most of the reading processes of skilled readers, eye movement is one aspect of highly unconscious reading. When reading automatically (FAST), our line of sight is trained to return to the same horizontal position while moving down one line. If the text is centered or right-aligned, the horizontal start position of each row is different. Automatic eye movement will bring our sight to the wrong position, so we must consciously adjust our sight to the actual starting position of each line. This forced us to exit the unconscious reading status, and the reading speed slowed down.

 

Inspiration for design: support, rather than interfering with reading

Obviously, a designer's goal should be to support reading, rather than interfering with reading. A majority of skilled reading is based on unconscious recognition of features, letters, and words. The easier identification, the faster reading. On the contrary, unskilled reading requires the help of context prompts.

Generally, the following guidelines apply.

1. Ensure that the text in the user interface can be effectively processed based on the characteristics of the unconscious processing, can be achieved by avoiding the destructive defects described previously. These defects include unrecognizable or too small fonts, backgrounds with patterns, and center alignment.

2. Use limited and highly consistent words, which are sometimes called "straightforward language" or "simple language" in the industry"

3. Design the text format into a visual hierarchy to make browsing easier, such as using titles, lists, tables, and visually enhanced words.

 

Reading many of the requirements in the software is unnecessary.

In addition to the design errors that may affect reading, many software user interfaces also display too much text, and users need to read far more than they actually need.

 

Inspiration for design: try to make people read as little as possible

Too many texts on the user interface will lead to the loss of poor readers. Unfortunately, they occupy a very large proportion of the population. Too many texts even make excellent readers feel alienated, which makes the interaction system daunting.

Reduce the text in the user interface as much as possible, and do not let the user view the text in a large layout. In the user guide, use the least amount of text to complete the goal.

 

Test real users

Finally, the designer should test the design in the target user group so that users can quickly and easily read all important information.