Hard to read

One of the members of my Ecom Convert group shared some interesting research about ALL CAPS text in a comment to a mini-teardown last week:

Roughly 90% of people find all-capped text to be harder to read, in general.

 

These two articles were given as sources:

• https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/styling-text-website-research/
• https://blog.prototypr.io/all-caps-on-ui-good-or-bad-2570f14dc457

 

 

I dug a bit deeper

In this study (source), they reveal that glanceable text is more readable and faster to ‘glance at’ when in ALL CAPS, and NOT condensed (regular format). For example:

 

Labels

Glanceable text on your store can be, for example, labels on product thumbnails in your product lists.

 

Longer text

In that same article by NN/g, they also confirm that for longer text (titles, subheadings or paragraphs, for example), ALL CAPS isn’t a good idea.

 

Slower reading

Now what the studies don’t mention is whether slower reading is always a bad thing. I could imagine why having users slow down and take more time to read a heading isn’t such a bad thing. I have yet to find any study about that, however.