Onion skinning the cues to visual recognition

Sylwia Frankowska has written an interesting piece on the BBC’s ‘onion skinning’ visual recognition research.

‘It was quite clear from the beginning that the participants naturally fell into one of two groups: ‘design-aware’ participants for whom design was very important and could potentially either attract them of put them off using websites, and another group of ‘content-driven’ participants, who weren’t so much concerned with the design as long as they were able to easily find information they wanted. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the division seemed related to age with the younger participants being more design-aware.’

Some interesting assumptions and conclusions in there, but notable just how important typography appeared to be to visual recognition, even where the chosen font – poor old Verdana – is a system font, yet perceived as being a strong part of the BBC brand online.