By Marko Dugonjić CHAPTER 9connecting with a preceding and/or a succeeding letter, thus all primary letters
have conditional forms (allographs), depending on whether they are at the
beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit four distinct forms
(initial, medial, final or isolated).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabetEven if only the local audience is to be targeted and the designer is
familiar with the language, it is crucial for the designer to go out and ob-
serve people. You don’t have to be trained to conduct comprehensive user
interviews or contextual inquiries. A less formal approach is completely
acceptable. Simply spend some time among the general public and you
should get a valuable insight into people’s behavior. Pretend that you are
a spy. Stand near a kiosk to see what newspapers are read and how cover
pages influence buying choices. Observe how much time people spend
reading a book in the park. Learn what kinds of topics are consumed and
in which contexts. Public transportation is ideal for this, as people usually
isolate themselves while diving deep into content, whether it’s text, music
or video. Visit a library or watch people in the waiting room at the doctor’s
or hairdresser’s. These are all methods of research for any design project.
When we design with typography, a good test is to simply ask someone
to read the text out loud. If they struggle with otherwise easy to read text
and the reading pace is uneven, that’s a sure sign something is standing in
the way. The solution might be as simple as tweaking letter-spacing, short-
ening the line length or widening the gutter between two columns.
Another great test is to present a person with a document and ask them
to find some information buried within it as quickly as possible. Or you
can ask them to read text within a limited timeframe and then ask them a
set of questions to test whether they were able to find and comprehend all
of the important facts.
While it’s not necessary to undertake this kind of research on each
and every project, observing how people read and share content usually
improves your perspective and understanding.