Improve Your Website’s Usability by Choosing the Right UI Font

Choosing the right UI design for your website can be difficult, especially when your preference could differ between an easy-to-use, delightful and a new app which nobody wants to like, it just becomes a more challenging task. So, how will you choose the perfect UI font for your website?

There are some exclusive challenges related to choosing the perfect UI font. Basically, you are not only seeking a typeface which has a powerful effect or feels on-brand. You are actually seeking a real efficient typeface:

1) a font which has simply individual lowercase Ls and capital Is, 2) a face which looks simply as perfect set at 10px as it does at 72px also, and 3) a font which performs better across devices and contexts.

What is the reason? After all that time, you have invested in making your user interface easy-to-use and clear, and you do not want the text that will help people — rather confusing them. Remembering this, here is what you require searching for in the fonts of your UI design:

Simply detectable letterforms

This was basically not designed for small sizes on the screens. It’s hard to decode the words like ‘milliliter’. In case you have needed to write or read a password that contains i or 1, l or l, you will understand the issue.

There are a few difficulties while using the Helvetica in UI. Alphabets allow a great range of expressions with a tiny set of graphical components. That’s really great but unluckily the bad impact is that a few letterforms are really puzzling, particularly when they are placed at a small size.

The issue of letterform confusion can be especially pronounced in the geometric fonts like Circular, Avenir, Futura, etc. so think properly while selecting one of these for your UI design. Further when you will measure the UI typefaces, ensure to compare all letters for seeing how they can be detected easily.

Considerable x-height

While talking about typography, we find x-height assessing the distance between the mean height of all lowercase letters and the baseline when you avoid the ascenders like the top of the T and H. You should look at the x-height of your fonts as the larger x-heights can easily translate to the simpler legibility while placed at tinier sizes.

In UI design, you always don’t need to get space for maximum large-set text. Hence typesetting is called an exceptional balance between the legibility and text size. A font with considerable x-height will help you use smaller without illegibility.

Superfamily flexibility

This is not highly necessitous — you can easily design the overall user-interface with a single font — but it is highly useful to have various styles and weights at your conclusion. Long ago, type designers understood that a few design changes worked greater at the large sizes than the small ones and vice versa and for this reason, you will find different font styles like condensed, caption, display, etc.

In case your user interface incorporates different kinds of contents like headlines, captions, help text, and labels, it will be extremely useful for the font for supporting every individual type of text. It’s useful for all designs as well as clients because it enables using type expressively with no risk of losing attachment in the designs.

Even you can take more steps and seek a superfamily, the font which incorporates various font styles such a monospace, a sans serif, and a serif. This will help you choose options for an expressive typography that enables for a coordinated feel.

Entire readability

You should also take your step back from different letterforms, pondering the font’s entire readability at the word level. Using right UI font, you can detect words effortlessly.

If you compare Source Sans Pro and Brush Script MT, you can see that the difficult letterforms of the script font need more effort and time to decode than the comparatively easy forms of the Sans Serif. This comparison also showcases that both fonts are almost at the similar size although Source Sans looks larger in comparison.

Brand alignment

Ultimately, you should ensure that your UI font aligns properly with the entire brand of your website. An eccentric font is not so important if you prefer fun, quirky content. Only remember that fun letterforms can be suboptimal in UIs.

However, you can get a powerful sense of the brand of a font and how it is connected with your website’s brand with only an appearance. Nevertheless, you don’t prefer to restrict this measurement to yourself as the response to a font is subjective from your side and you will prefer asking others what their response will be about your possible choices.

Verdict

So, this is how you can choose the perfect UI font to improve your website’s usability. What’s your favorite font? Let us know in the comment section below.

Sanjay Dey — Freelance web designer based in India, with over 16 years of experience.