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Subject:Re: Quotation marks around user interface labels From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:50:46 -0700
Angle brackets are visual shorthand and can be touch-typed in any
context. They're as easy to skim as a series of bolded words, arguably
more so.
If you're not highlighting UI elements with character tags, there are
contexts where UI strings that are not in initial caps result in
ambiguous wording, hence the need to wrap them in quotes—though if I
have editorial discretion over the UI strings, I'll change those
instead.
As an old boss used to say, we're not the Formatting Department.
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Lynne Wright
<Lynne -dot- Wright -at- tiburoninc -dot- com> wrote:
> I agree that quotation marks just add clutter.
>
> However, I think that bolding the UI elements that you use to perform an action enhances useability.
>
> Given that people aren't prone to taking the time to read procedures slowly and carefully, bolding enables users to kind of skim a procedure and semi-intuit what actions to do by focusing on the key words and skipping the filler(ish) stuff (all the "click the" or "in the" phrases and such).
>
> In other words, it creates a visual shorthand for fairly adept users.
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