The general consensus is that zebra striping a table makes it a little easier for people to keep track of which row they're on...but is this reduction of cognitive taxes only for table rows? I at least sometimes backtrack when I'm reading to a previous line of text.
I've zebra striped an article page and I am wondering if this is an added benefit or just something that is interesting but not better than the way people read almost everything else?
Answer
The purpose of zebra striping is (with arguable success) to connect items in a row that are a distance apart...often as you'd see in a table and where scanning (rather than reading line-by-line) is often a goal.
Item Item Item
But a paragraph of text has no such problem--the lines of text, themselves, make the connection for you. And proper and thoughtful linespacing is all the division you need between lines.
So, I'd say zebra striping for a paragraph of text is an attempt at fixing a non-existent problem with a solution intended for an entirely different context.
No comments:
Post a Comment