Title: What UX Writers and Designers Can Learn from Street Signs
Context: It is the foolish user who ignores signage. It is the even more foolish designer who relies on nothing but.
Synopsis: How often do you pay attention to the signs you see along the side of a road? Probably not very consciously anyway, but I’d bet you still leverage the most familiar ones to make your journey easier—and perhaps even save a life or two—often without thinking about it. Red octagons, yellow triangles, orange diamonds, blue squares; all tell their own story, and even outside the range of readability, they start to tell a very meaningful one that would otherwise result in chaos if they didn’t. Surely software has a much broader and more complex range of issues to address when communicating information to people, but there are still a few lessons that we as designers can learn from the humble street sign. Leverage the innate language of human symbolism and color theory to prevent egregious errors when required and use consistent visual cues to at least start to inform even before a line of copy can possibly be read. In short: <<red octagon>> making your users’ lives more complicated than they need to be.
Best Bit: “Using a few words and symbols to communicate a lot isn’t a novel concept; street signs have been following the same basic principles as UX writers for decades.”
via uxbooth.com
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