Sweating the small stuff

Andrea Widener asked me a question today about our use of underscore for selective emphasis in Web surveys. We used to use blue. Andrea’s query made we wonder what the current thinking is on the topic. For this I turned to Mick Couper’s Designing Effective Web Surveys. Now I should divulge at the outset that (1) Mick is an old and good friend, (2) he mentions me in the acknowledgements, and (3) I praise the book on the back cover. Thing is, I meant what I said.

At any rate, I was curious about what Mick had to say on the topic. He runs through all of the options. He warns that UPPER CASE is usually a sort of visual search tool in documents to help you find things and generally does not encourage reading all the text. Italics are hard to read, especially if there is a lot of it on the relatively low resolution of a monitor. As for our old standard blue, he quotes usability guru Jakob Nielsen, “On the Web blue text equals clickable text, so never make text blue if it is not clickable.” And then Nielsen goes on to warn about using underline for anything that is not a link.

As for color, well he goes after that, too. He points out that many colors—like blue, green, and yellow—are inherently weak compared to black, and so I suppose they might de-emphasize rather than emphasize. He also warns that color has meaning and therefore might influence how someone interprets a question. And, of course, some people are color blind.

In the end he recommends “bold, italics, or UPPERCASE, in that order. I guess we have some rethinking to do.

He also goes on to warn against a common problem: overuse. Remember, it only stands out if it is really different from everything else on the page. After all, it is supposed to be selective.