Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Do people really have that much trouble focusing as they read? Honestly I have trouble focusing when you fit maybe a dozen words per line, with giant swatches of nothing surrounding it. I have to change any wiki article I read to the wide format or it's virtually unreadable to me.
That is funny! I’ve opted-in to change the default & tried the wide format on Wikipedia a few times and each time it has reinforced what I perceived to be the obvious developer decision based on (ostensibly) the “obvious“ user preference… :)
That you're terrible at reading?
Very much so. The longer the line, the more your eyes move and the easier it is to lose track of where you are. It can be worse when you move to the next line, as you lose your frame of reference from the previous line on the other side of the screen.
@brandon @Zorque This has been researched about hundred times and for most readers in the Roman alphabet lines between 55 and 70 characters - a space is a character too - are easiest to read. Hence scientific articles in Latex and similar later text mark up languages use two columns on a A4 paper.
So why dont sites use multiple columns?
@Zorque Habit, I guess. If I create a website, I can chose from about 70 templates with Everweb, no of them having a two column lay out.
So I guess it’s difficult to get this right in HTML but I’m by no means an expert on this topic.
I can say i have experienced that occasionally, but it had less to do with being hard to read visually and more to do with just not caring about what I'm reading. Which seems less of a "We need to make this easier to read" and more a "We need to trick people into thinking they're reading something meaningful" problem.
Is it something to do with shortsightedness? Maybe an ADHD thing that somehow doesn't affect me for some reason? Maybe just I'm super good at basic visual spatial orientation?
Or is it just that people read with such small text that it's hard to differentiate between lines? I honestly can't fathom an inability to read a line in any other circumstances.