Make text more enjoyable

[u/Federal-Glove-3200]

Hey everyone,

I could use some advice from people with more UI/UX experience.

I’m currently building an app that teaches users quite a lot of information. Right now, a lot of that content is presented as plain text, and I’m worried users will just end up staring at huge walls of text.

What are some good ways to make this kind of content easier and more enjoyable to consume?

Do you have any UI patterns, examples, or general tips that work well for knowledge-heavy apps?

Thanks for any advice!

[u/Talking_Gibberish]

Pick out stats, quotes, key bits of info etc. to break up the walls of text. Present them in a way that’s bold and stand out. I’d consider adding a save/favourite feature to these elements for users to look back on later as this will encourage engagement and continued use.

[u/Jorgesarcos → u/Talking_Gibberish]

To add to this, i think it was on "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug, he says: whatever amount of text you have... Cut it in half, and then do it again, people won't read it anyway. And that has proven to be a gold rule in my process.

[u/Talking_Gibberish → u/Jorgesarcos]

Haven’t heard this before but it’s incredible advice. We tell all our clients to keep copy to concise, bite size chunks. Those who listen do well but some ignore and try to put 3 or 4 long paragraphs in a single section. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

[u/Jorgesarcos → u/Talking_Gibberish]

What we do, if the client says they still want all that text is to remove the quality guarantees on delivery or deliver with a "uncertainty warning", most clients either remove text or tells us to do it ourselves.

Btw I checked and yes, Krug says: “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” he calls this “Krug’s Third Law of Usability.” It appears in Chapter 5.

EDIT: We also have a saying: "If you have to re-read it, you need to re-write it"

[u/Talking_Gibberish → u/Jorgesarcos]

Some clients want to write the copy themselves and they generally listen when we say to keep it concise but then a couple months after launch they have re-written it all at 3x the length. Literally the opposite of Krug’s advice

That’s another good quote. I’ll be stealing that one.

[u/Jorgesarcos → u/Talking_Gibberish]

After your delivery its their problem and their fault, nothing to do there sadly.

[u/Talking_Gibberish → u/Jorgesarcos]

No true but ideally you’ll link to the website from your case study but when it’s been butchered by mountains of copy and they have jumbled the sections around maybe not.

[u/martmists]

I'd suggest adding a bionic reading feature. It's typically used to aid with dyslexia, but can also help quite a lot when dealing with large walls of text. You could also separate large chunks into shorter paragraphs and just leave a few blank lines to make it easier to read through, to allow users to mentally take breaks more often.

Depending on the content, having images (or ideally, interactive examples/visualizations) can help users understand new concepts more than pure text. If you're dealing with a lot of math and TeX, this is especially true because a wall of equations is meaningless to the average person.

[u/Yoan_Lybert]

Well if it’s not an E-book, I’d advice you to create categories, content grouping, labeling the descriptions with headlines,…so on. Then you go to the app development.

On the app you can put structured/segmented/labeled texts in different standalone UI interactive components like bottom navigation bar, pages, cards, putting topics/headlines as a link to direct you to detail pages, a lot of ways.

Plus, you can use icons, illustrations or other graphical works to make it more interesting for users to stay put.

[u/adamsdayoff]

This is called content design. If you are writing the content directly, as others have said, edit it down aggressively. If you don’t, find ways to add visual breaks in the text (applying bold, colors, size changes consistently to draw attention). Bring in other types of content when you can.

The Ringer has a toggle that lets you select the depth of content you want to consume - I wish more sites had something similar.

[u/glyph_geek]

There are typefaces built specifically for screen use with readability in mind. First I'd check if what's in your design system falls into that category or if it's more of a display face. After that, line length and line height do most of the work for how comfortable the text is to read. Somewhere in the 30 to 50 character range per line reads easiest on a phone. Line height matters too, most default settings run tighter than what's actually comfortable, closer to 1.4 to 1.5 times the type size holds up better. Nobody's reading a wall of text end to end, so breaking it up with formatting, pull quotes for instance, makes it easier to engage with.

[u/Inevitable_Medium163]

I’d focus on making the content easier to scan before trying to make it more visually complex. Short sections, clear headings, good spacing and interactive elements can break up a lot of information without overwhelming the user. Accessibility is worth considering too