From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,768ec7d79291ed2c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: mheaney@ni.net (Matthew Heaney) Subject: Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case Date: 1997/03/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 228888814 References: <1997Mar26.185431.12742@nosc.mil> <333AB9A0.7284@grammatech.com> Organization: Estormza Software Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In Guidelines for Enterprise-Wide GUI Design, authors Susan Weinschenk and Sarah C. Yeo state that "Sentances in all capital letters are 20 percent more difficult to read than sentences with upper- and lower-case letters. Avoid using all caps for large blocks of text." [p. 101] They later state, when discussing online help, that one should "Never use all caps, except for acronyms and initializations. Words in all caps are harder to read." [p. 144] In Usability Engineering, author Jakob Nielsen states that "On alphanumeric terminals, UPPERCASE TEXT CASE CAN ALSO BE USED TO GET THE USERS' ATTENTION, but upper case should be used sparingly as it is about 10% slower to read than mixed-case text." [p. 118-9] In Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design, author Deborah J. Mayhew states "Avoid heavy use of all-uppercase letters. Text in all uppercase is more difficult to read than text in mixed case. Tullis (1988) reviews literature suggesting that people read mixed case text about 13% faster than uppercase. This is because lowercase letters look more different from one another than do uppercase letters, making it easier to determine a word in part by its overall shape." [p. 469] The Tullis reference is Screen Design Thomas S. Tullis Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction Martin Helander, ed (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988), p. 377-411 Jakob Nielsen writes a regular Interface column for IEEE Software. He can be reached at . Hope that helps, Matt -------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Heaney Software Development Consultant (818) 985-1271