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White Space |
"Use White Space on a Text-Heavy Page. It is tiring to the eye to read text-heavy pages. Use margins and sizeable breaks between sections to provide a more attractive (and less oppressive) page design." (1)
"As with all layout, white space is not necessarily useless, and it would be a mistake to design overly compact pages. Whitespace can guide the eye and help users understand the grouping of information. If you have the choice between separating two segments of content by a heavy line or some whitespace, it will often look better to use the whitespace solution, which will typically also download faster." (3, pg. 18)
"I do not consider whitespace wasted when it is part of content design or navigation design, but ... there is also some amount of whitespace that is not present due to any design considerations; instead, it simply shows up because the page does not adjust itself to fit the available window. Some amount of wasted space is inevitable in most designs because it is almost impossible to make a page that will be shown as a perfect rectangle within the user's browser under all circumstances. Some holes will usually be left over." (3, pg. 22)
With the above quotes in mind, consider the following quote that seems to completely contradict those above:
"Standard design textbooks say that white-space is good. ... Surprisingly, however, we found no indication that white-space is beneficial on the web. In fact,
- The more white-space there was on a site, the less successful users were at finding information
- The more white-space, the lower the users rated the site in terms of
- finding things easily,
- ease of reading,
- ease of searching,
- overall appearance,
- ease of use, and
- productivity" (4, pg. 74-75)
A good example that the usability rule-of-thumb are not written in stone!