One thing I’ve been noticing lately is the importance of text to a website design. Text has always been important and I’ve been looking more at the interaction text not just the copy. I am talking about the labels, marks and leads there are on every websites. From navigation to form elements and a dose of section headers.
There was a while back an article at A List Apart Derek Powazek.
“User experience isn’t just visual design. It’s time we designers stop thinking of ourselves as merely pixel people, and start thinking of ourselves as the creators of experiences.”
There has been a great deal of talk about user experience. Taking the entire site as a foundation for this experience means you can’t avoid copy. As the A List Apart article goes onto say.
“Text is interface. This is not just marketing text (though it's that, too). It's interface. This is text that can't come from the PR department – it comes from us, the designers who are responsible for the user experience.”
Traditionally, when thinking about text the copy was focused on and the other elements were ignored or just left to the default settings. What is needed to obtain a user interface is to look at everything from submit buttons to form text and navigation. Don’t just put submit in a button to send a form, how about putting what you are using the form to do – sign up, enter here. Nothing works better than a nice welcome on a web page and a personal touch to the interaction. When a user is logged in, say welcome or hello using their username. These are all simple steps you can do to create a better user experience for any website.
