deskthority

Heya,

I'm hoping this is the correct place to post feedback, but anyway, here goes:

The forum is awesome no doubt. But I keep finding it a bit annoying that it's all written with lower case, which is not correct.

It should be the following:

• Keyboards
  Mice & Other Devices
  News & Reviews
  Deskthority Wiki
  Photos & Videos
  Workshop
  Marketplace
  Other Languages
  Off-Topic
  Deskthority Related

I also noticed that the actual "Knowledge Base & Media" needs to be fixed as well (didn't notice at first as it was all capitalized, but noticed @ "Jump to: Board index » Knowledge base & media"). The rest should be good I think.

Note that "&" can be replaced with and. Also and should be lowercase so "News and Reviews" if you'd prefer to have it that way, which I'm not sure about.

It was done on purpose, because usability and reading research (among others by MS and Apple) prove our way to be more readable and easier to process for the mind. So we're not going to change it. You'll find this more and more in your operating systems and web sites. Your preferred method is a leftover from the old print world.

webwit wrote:It was done on purpose, because usability and reading research (among others by MS and Apple) prove our way to be more readable. So no, we're not going to break it. You'll find this more and more in your operating systems and web sites. Your preferred method is a leftover from the old print world.

Perhaps you could give me a link regarding that? I'd gladly read it, as I find this quite interesting. But now I know that it was done on purpose.

I know that it's the way we capitalize subjects and such in Swedish, but it's not the right way of doing it in English yet.

Edit: I think you should fix the "Off-topic" board though, as it should be that and not "Offtopic". Sorry for being so pointy by the way.

No problem, I like to get the details right as well. I'll fix Off-topic.

Unfortunately I didn't archive that article (it was not research but an article about the research), and the big corp research won't be online. The results of this on Microsoft Windows 7 UX Guidelines are online though:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... talization
They have gradually moved away from title-style to sentence-style capitalization for everything except the title bar now. There is probably a lot more if you search for title-style vs sentence-style. If I remember correctly test groups were giving interfaces with different formats for texts, and things like reading speed and comprehension speed were measured, and the human eye tires more and has more difficulty processing capital shapes. In short, sentence style makes your site or interface more friendly and easier on the eye. Things are moving slowly though because there's a lot of legacy and convention.

This makes sense. I recall reading something to the effect that our trained eyes recognize entire words, a word at a time, exactly like the Chinese or Japanese do with their hanzi. Since words in all lowercase occur much more frequently, we're much better trained to recognize them. We don't normally read letter-by-letter, but can do it too, albeit slowly, and that's what happens when we stumble across something less familiar, like a capitalized word.