Why Font Selection and Usability Matter on Your Product

So last night I was chatting with Rae about Partnering for Profits program on Copyblogger. I paid signed up and downloaded my PDF copy. I sent myself a copy of the PDF by email so I could read it on my iPhone. When I did I encountered a problem I see with a lot of other products so I thought I’d share.

The PDF is printed in a serif font (fonts with little thingys hanging off them) at the end. This is a carryover from print days when newspapers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal used them. However they are really bad for usability/readability on the web. For web based material you are much better off using a clean sans-serif font like Arial or Verdana. Think I’m being a baby take a look at the screen shots below and tell me which you find more readable.

#1) serif font in a PDF
#2) sans serif font in a PDF
#3) PDF converted to a web page in instapaper with user selected sans serif font

IMHO #1 is unreadable. Maybe for an email or single page but at 150+ pages, never going to happen. #2 is better and I could power through it. However #3 which removes the content from the context and lets the user choose the font size and style has the highest usability.

I don’t know that the authors ever considered I’d be reading it on a iPhone, but as smart phones become more ubiquitous it’s going to happen. Maybe I want to read a chapter while I’m waiting for my kids in karate class, or maybe other people will take their blackberry into the bathroom to read, or maybe someone will want to read the PDF they bought on a plane to a conference. The takeaway here is make it easy to consume your content, consider things like formatting, and font selection, allow some fexibility or wiggle room when you sell or distribute your product.

epilogue:
for people who want to convert things here’s how, use foxit to save your PDF as a text file, import it into your document editor of choice (I use google docs). Save it as a PDF or export it as an HTML. Upload the file and use Instapaper to pull it in, make sure you pull it in locally on your device then delete it.

Is taking someone’s copyrighted document and publishing it a copyright violation, technically, I’m sure it is. Putting it up temporariliy on a secret URL feeding it to instapaper and then pulling it down, IMHO follows the spirit of the law, but not the letter. I didn’t give it to anyone I just converted the it to a preferred format. Giving it away to other people IS breaking the law, and just bad mojo.

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3 Responses to “Why Font Selection and Usability Matter on Your Product”

1. charles Says:
   December 4th, 2008 at 11:41 am

   I use verdana and arial in my blogs because they look good on the web.

2. MikeTek Says:
   December 4th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

   I’ve found the Partner for Profits PDF to be difficult to read even on a 22″ wide screen LCD monitor. I’m sure it looks fine in print, but I’m not about burn through an entire printer cartridge to print these 154 pages. They definitely could have done a better job in this regard.

3. Norhafidz Says:
   December 4th, 2008 at 6:00 pm

   I fell in love with Thesis’s theme font, I don’t know what it is called, since I am not a web savvy. But it is great