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Do Zebra Stripes Actually Help?
RyoShin writes "A List Apart, an excellent resource for web development and related aesthetics, has put together an article based on original research by Jessica Enders into 'zebra striping.' From the article: 'Zebra striping [coloring alternate rows] is used when data is presented in an essentially tabular form. The user of that table will be looking for one or more data points. Their aim is to get the right points and get them as quickly as possible. Therefore, if we set a task that uses a table, and zebra striping does make things easier, then we would expect to see improvements in two things: accuracy and speed.' The conclusion of the peer reviewed paper? It's a wash. Striped tables offered only a slight increase in accuracy and speed overall. The article notes a few other benefits to using Zebra striping, so it's all up to the individual."
Although it might not provide much extra accuracy, it does make for a nicer looking GUI. That counts for something in todays widget driven environment...
Must be a really, really slow day...
http://improbable.com/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And this study cost how much?
"And now, the first Stripeless Zebra" from Bob's Circus, Bob and Tom show.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
Yes, much in the same way that Go Faster Stripes work...
Summation 2
I just think it looks better aesthetically. Breaks up the page a bit than giving an entire boring white page. I know the last thing programmers generally look at is how things look (but how it works instead) but even if its not faster it looks cleaner from a design POV.
Finding data in nine columns with alternating text and numbers is easy. Try upping the number of columns, using only numbers, use close spacing, and reduce the text size. Then you will see a difference. This experiment is flawed because they didn't test how the values scale with more columns and less helpful clues (like the differences between text and spacing in their sample table). This article should have been rejected for not taking into account these issues.
I don't have a study to prove it, but coloring or otherwise marking every Nth row, where n is a smallish number, say 2-5, helps.
Anyone else remember fanfold wide-format computer paper that was colored white and green in alternating blocks of 3 rows each?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
if you get run over at a zebra crossing you'll be easier to see whether you are black or white.
I personally hate when long tables/lists aren't zebra striped. If the type is smaller than 10 point or so, I REALLY need this.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
Zebra striping ineffective? Preposterous! What sort of Game is this Jessica Enders playing?
It depends on the program displaying the data. Some programs allow you to to click on the row and get that one row highlighted. That is a huge help. Others like tables on a web page don't allow that. In that case I say it does help.
Also the size of the table makes a difference.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
is irrelevant.
On narrow tables they don't make a difference. But on wide tables they're almost a necessity. Without any table cell borders, like a spreadsheet, or striping, the eye easily wanders up or down into another row when reading across. I can say anecdotally that I'm far more accurate and faster when reading a table with stripes.
Either way, they certainly can't hurt, especially if they're a pale color. So why are we even having this discussion?
Developers: We can use your help.
Of course they help. They let us know where it's legal to cross the street.
This guy's the limit!
For sure zebra-striped tables look way better than the ugly bold-bordered tables in TFA.
So they conclude it doesn't help (though their own data says that it does, even though it's slight) based on THAT table? Maybe they should try it again with a zebra striped table where the difference between the colors used is slightly more pronounced. I don't know about the rest here but I personally think I had a harder time with that because the color difference between rows was so slight than if they had left out the color. Played tricks on my eyes.
If zebra striping doesn't actually make it easier to identify which cells actually belong to a given row - maybe a rethink of what is trying to be accomplished here could help. Perhaps highlighting of the row under the cursor?
sloth jr
Study conducted of whether long-held belief has real benefits. Conclusion: Maybe a little.
News at 11.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Okay, I was actually hoping for some research into whether the camouflage on actual physical zebras was effective. This is just really disappointing, people. Rectify the mistake immediately.
in real life, however, are incalculable. well, except that you constantly get scanned and have to pay for yourself nearly everywhere you shop.
hiding near a white picket fence at night is a breeze, though.
The example table in TFA has a light gray outline around every cell. I'm not sure if the table used in the experiment did, but I wouldn't doubt that the thin horizontal lines between each row/column can help "guide" the eyes the same way that zebra striping supposedly would.
Put the table on a plain white background with no borders, and I bet the results would be different. I would also bet that changing the spacing between columns (to add large chunks of white space, for example) would affect the results, too.
The more columns/complex the table Zebra striping will help the user not lose their place. But, this needs to be balanced with the length of the table. After a while they will forget which line they're on regardless of formatting.
That's why I'm a fan of showing the least amount of data I can. More complex = more chance for errors. Drill down application are a pain, but, better than a mistake in payroll.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
That's why I still print out web pages on greenbar before reading them.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
The answer is: Yes, they do!
Well, that was fun.
I can tell you why it didn't help. They formatted their table with large spaces between columns and they had only 9 rows. If they tried the same study where they also varied the number of rows I am sure they would find that as the rows increase the positive effect of zebra striping increases. It seems they had a bias built into their test in order to find something unexpected... otherwise the study would have proved pointless.
I can see the Slashdot headline now, "A practice used for over half a century still proves to be useful!" Somehow, I think such a headline falls under the category of "not news."
I see a problem with the experiment. The hard part of the questions involves scanning down a column , where horizontal striping obviously does not help.
Of Course Zebra Stripes Help!
If they didn't, lions would be way fatter!
There may be an effect, but if so, it's small enough that 281 experimental subjects and six questions are not enough to yield statistically significant results. That result alone (that the effect is small at best) makes the paper worthwhile to me. One small quibble: on a web page, I can often use scrolling and the bottom or top of the page to check alignment on a wide table. Maybe zebra stripes are more useful on paper.
But before I give up entirely on zebra stripes, I'd like to see what happens when [1] the table is made wider; [2] the table is made taller; [3] the zebra stripes are 2 or 3 rows wide instead of 1; [4] the stripes are made darker and/or a different color.
C'mon people who want publications, there are lots of other things to try here.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The old AD&D books used 3 rows gray, 3 rows white. That made the stripes wide enough that they were easy to follow, and made it possible to visually pick 'the top line that gray part' or 'the line in the middle line of that white part'. Not peer-reviewed study to back this up, but I always found them very easy to follow, much easier than single-row shading.
-Lars
Nystagmus is a condition where your eyes oscillate at a frequency of about 1 Hz (roughly), usually horizontally. Having rows and especially columns coloured differently helps very much for someone affected by Nystagmus, to distinguish between columns.
BTW, a wider font like Verdana is also highly recommended.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'll get the wtf out of the way first
"Given that applying zebra striping in an electronic medium is a nontrivial task"
Say what? Any application that is based on columns and/or rows has trivial access to those columns/rows as separate entities. Markup for such columns/rows is easily changed. 'mod N 2 == 0? grey:white' is hardly nontrivial, it's so basic that if you can't manage to do it, you must be using the wrong software.
---
Now for the scope - it seems like the only research they have done is when data in the sheet is dense and the sheet itself is not all that wide.
Now try with a wide sheet and instead of every 'cell' or at least one of its close neighbors having data in it, imagine lots of empty cells. Now try and see if zebrastriping helps or not. I can guarantee you that without any visual cues, your lining up of something in the leftmost column to the same line on the rightmost column is going to fail far more often than you'd like.
--
Oh wait, they even admit as much:
"However, there is clearly a need for additional studies to investigate how task difficulty and the size of the table/form influence the effect of zebra striping."
No shit. I'm glad you admitted that your sample size is too low.
I thought this article was going to be about the evolutionary advantage that stripes give zebras, not spreadsheets. Who cares about spreadsheets, what about the zebras?
In the example she used in the test, all the cells are divided by black lines, the zebra striping is very faint, and the table is narrow. It's not a surprise she didn't see much difference, the experiment looks like it was almost designed to come up with that result.
If she tried it again without the black lines dividing the cells, with less faint stripes and with a wider table, she would have come up with a very different result.
The stripes helped my Zuba's look cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
I think zebra striping helps people read tables with more than four columns, but there's also a camouflage effect especially when a quick glance is given.
technical writing / development
... when they came up with that conclusion of 'a wash'.
They expected an improvement and they got an improvement AND there were other benefits as well.
Now what would be interesting is if colour would be of importance and what contrast would be the best and if the test must be on the lines or not.
What about dual lines? Tripple lines?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Oh, that was easy says Man, who goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
But are real zebras white horses with black stripes, or black horses with white strips? Yes there is a correct answer to this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
On printed pages, I've seen people using a ruler to help scan through tables of numbers. I thought that was where the idea for zebra striping came from. Honestly, I'm surprised that it was only a minor improvement. Maybe it's just me and my bad eyes, but I think it helps tremendously. It probably also matters how many columns there are -- the more there are, the more it helps. I'd also suspect that fatigue would kick in, so it would make less difference for, say, less than 100 exercises, and more difference after that. [Didn't RTFA. Maybe they address those points.]
I'm no GUI designer, but when I make utility web pages that use tables, I tend to use either zebra striping or a tr:hover that uses a light yellow to highlight the line under the mouse pointer. That way, if I feel I need the help to track through the table, I just run the mouse down the columns and it lines up the current row for me very nicely. IMHO, this is a nice compromise where zebra striping might not look good, but the user might want the help nonetheless.
Perhaps I'm being a bit pedantic, but am I the only one that thought some of the questions were oddly worded?
Here's what I view as correct answers:
Q What is the name of the screw that costs $35.66?
A: None. The M28 screw costs $35.66 per 50.
Q There are 664 screws of which minor diameter tolerance?
A: None. The M18 Screw has a minor diameter tolerance of 8g, and there are 664 of those, but there are 1442 screws with a tolerance of 8g.
Q: There are 292 screws of what thread pitch?
A: None. There are 292 M16 screws which have a thread pitch of 2mm, but there are 527 screws with a thread pitch of 2mm.
In addition to that excellent point, I'm skeptical about the way the table was designed. There's an image of the table here:
http://alistapart.com/d/zebrastripingdoesithelp/data-table.png
The "ordinary" rows have a background color of pure white. The "striped" rows have a background color of #F5F5F5, a very light grey. I'm all in favor of subtle design, but there is such a thing as being too subtle.
Perhaps the stripes did not help noticeably because there was insufficient contrast between the rows?
When the participants violate the very precepts of the study by creating their own striping, the study become ridiculous. It's like doing a study if walking is slower than biking, and the walkers are allowed to bring their own bikes.
But the study itself is great, I just disagree with the conclusion, it seems to show that striping is SO useful that when denied striping, people create their own.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
The problem isn't with the procedure in this study, but with the assumption that the stripes are there to hide the animal. Clearly, a zebra's vertical stripes are there for the slimming affect, so that predators will more likely eat the fat horse standing next to the zebra.
The way I see it, this person obviously wanted to prove that candy striping doesn't help because they personally don't like it. Candy striping isn't supposed to be a miracle fix that no one can live without...if it were all books would come candy striped. What it helps with are applications where users what to scan for specific information fast, not ones where people are trying to read them as books.
The reason it works is more physical than it is psychological. It helps your eyes read in a straight, horizontal line. This is the same reason that some people will read with a notecard underneath the line of text. It's easier for your eyes to move horizontally when there's something above and/or below it to tell you "keep your eyes in the center, buddy."
My personal experience is that I can fly through message boards, ledgers, etc. that employ this tactic while I tend to give up with/not use message boards, ledgers, etc. that don't. It's frustrating.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Huge flaw. He added border-lines. This test should be conducted without border lines! Another test was done somewhere about whether it was best to use background zebra striping, or have a border underneath to guide the eyes. I can't remember the results of it, but it would be relevant.
If you didn't like how they ran this test (and I agree with most of the complaints), A List Apart is running a follow-up survey over the internet. I almost missed this, as it isn't mentioned until the very end of the article.
You can find it at http://surveys.formulate.com.au/dtfu. It takes about three-five minutes. I just took it, and they appear to be using darker row colors now. It's still too narrow to see how useful it is when you have to scroll horizontally, but it's a small improvement at least.
I think the problem is that they were looking for specific data. They still have to look at every row....the striping just makes it easier to identify the other columns once you find the data.
Find the rows in the table where the tax rate is greater than 9%. Now list the names of the states with a tax rate greater than 9%. The striping really only helps in the second part of that process.
Layne
I see this in business all the time.
It's only a 1% difference so they cut it.
And they cut 15 other 1% things.
And the result is a cardboard tomato, a useless piece of software, an inferior product.
It is the 80/20 rule defined. You spend 80% of your time on 20% of the product to get a good product.
The result of their attitude is a product that is 80% as good as what you really wanted and needed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I like zebra striping that uses a virtual 'ruler'. It highlights the row that you're currently on, then you can very easily zip across the columns and see what you're actually on.
mininova has a great implementation of this imho. I liked it so much I stole the CSS for my personal websites.
You can violate almost any principle of design and show that for small data sets under lab conditions that principle doesn't contribute much to usability. For the dataset in question, you probably could misalign the columns and rows, then display them in six point type and there wouldn't be much difference in speed or accuracy.
The study gives a baseline result that is entirely credible: for small static datasets and a small number of questions, a non-fatigued subject population manages to get through a short list of relatively easy questions about as well with or without the striping.
It's a valid starting point, but it's not really enough for practitioners to pay attention yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is one of those things that you don't really NEED to test scientifically, at least in my opinion. Maybe looking at a zebra striped table is only marginally, if at all faster or more accurate, but I find it sure as hell is a lot more pleasant. Picking out data on a large unstriped table (small font for extra suckage points) just takes more concentration, regardless of whether it's slower. My opinion at least.
What peer review has this 'paper' gone through? This article should have been rejected? Has anyone 'accepted' it in the first place? Other than some /. editor that is.
I am willing to bet that 2-to-1 striping (white-white-grey) is even more efficient than 1-to-1 striping (white-grey). Why does this study ignore this? Its an "obvious" option...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
What about white on green?
which is totally what she said
His is a lot cooler than mine, but that's essentially what I'm talking about with the tr:hover tag. Thanks for the pointer. I'll check out the CSS to see what I can pick up!
Failure to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in accuracy is not the same as absence of such an improvement. For example, you can fail to demonstrate a significant improvement simply by making the sample size small enough or making the measurements noisier. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that if you make the sample large enough, you will find a statistically significant difference; whether there is a statistically significant difference simply isn't the right question to ask. The right question to ask is that, once you have enough samples to demonstrate a statistically significant difference and measure it, whether it is practically important.
In different words, if you can't demonstrate a statistically significant result, you don't have a negative result, but you basically hae no result at all and should consider your paper unpublishable.
Altogether, the paper only shows one thing conclusively: that its author and the OzCHI reviewers are statistically illiterate.
I can shrink the row height with zebra striping and it still looks good. If I have horizontal lines to separate each row, I need to make the row taller to have more separation between the lower case letters that extend below the baseline and the row's separating line.
Apart from the just plain wrong statistical reasoning, the experiment was done under uncontrolled conditions over the Internet. The sample table in the article actually had lines separating the columns and rows. Geez, with that, it's not surprising that the author finds no differences!
Zebra striping may or may not help significantly, but this paper won't tell you either way.
http://home1.gte.net/pjbemail/RibletFlow.html
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
I thought this was going to be a story about some researcher who had spray-painted some zebras out on the savanna to see if they were more vulnerable to lions ...
I have to note that on any printer supported by postscript or ghostscript, Emacs can print your code in language sensitive colors, on emacs generated "greybar" in multiple columns, in landscape or portrait and with line numbers.
On the rare occasions I print code out, boy does Emacs and Xemacs rock.
You could alternate the fonts instead of zebra striping.
Say a serif vs a non-serif font.
Bold vs non-bold.
Italic vs non-italic.
So you could have every other row be bold and every other column be italic.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... and here I thought the ID crowd was claiming a zebra's stripes provide no survival benefit and therefore are clear evidence of an Intelligent Interior Designer.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The premise of this article is that zebra striping is to aid people finding the data they are looking for faster. I think that is not as much the case as it is to help people keep track of the data once they have found it.
They noted that when people found the row they were looking for they usually highlighted that row somehow, either with a mouse select or using their own finger on the screen. This is what I think the main usefulness of zebra striping is: to help the user to visually keep track of the data on a selected row (and not necessarily in finding the row). Once you find the row you are looking for, it is easy to lose the row when scanning across it. One can end up mistakenly looking at data from the row above or below, especially if the row is long and requires scrolling. And even more so when there are tens or hundreds of rows (or more) in the results, making it easier to lose track of the row being looked at.
If people find the need to 'manually' zebra stripe the row, it is better then to provide this to them in the software. Especially if it aids them in reducing errors in reading data and thus allowing them to work faster. Even if they are not searching the rows faster.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Finding data in nine columns with alternating text and numbers is easy.
To expand on that idea, does the utility of a green-bar table expand as the table gets wider, either with more columns or wider columns? The sample table was a nice starting point, but by no means adequate to settle to the issue.
BTW, the accuracy of the answers was higher with the stripped report in each case! The difference was small (1%) in each case, but direction was consistent.
But the real junk comes in reporting the time to answer the questions. For 4 of the 6 questions, subjects got the answer in less time with the stripped table. For 2 of the 6, the plain table was faster. So what does the article include? A chart of average times FOR JUST THE 2 QUESTIONS WHERE THE PLAIN TABLE WAS FASTER!
Even if you haven't read any Edward Tufte, this has to stand out. What were they thinking? "Two-thirds of the data support the common sense conclusion that anyone would deduce without any study. We'll never get on /. reporting that. So let's chart the one third of the data that does seem counter-intuitive."
Won't zebra stripes make tables more vulnerable to attacks by hungry lions?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
That just limits the applicability of the results. It's not flawed, just short-sighted.
Also, the end of the article says they are planning to conduct a follow-up study to answer questions raised by this first round. Your criticism may well be addressed in that.
Another possible criticism is the fact that the participants apparently know the point of the study (at least in the case of the follow-up, which is linked to from the article). Could this affect the results? I wouldn't tend to think so, but perhaps. There's plenty of people on here who are seem to strongly favor striping who might participate, and either intentionally or subconsciously apply a less dedicated mindset to reading the non-striped sets.
Also, I was disappointed the researcher doesn't appear to have examined for statistical significance, although perhaps it's in the paper. I only read the article. A small improvement is an improvement nonetheless. The more telling question is, "are the results real, or are we being misled by natural variability?" However, that's just a lack of thoroughness in the analysis, not a flaw in the method.
On the plus side, it looks like she did take the time to create at least a partially balanced experiment, making sure each question was asked equally of both striped and non-striped tables and randomly assigned. I would consider the data basically useless without that measure.
It's doesn't look like a great experiment, but it's more rigorous in some ways than anything you'll find on Tom's Hardware.
There are just too many holes for that to have been peer reviewed before being posted.
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
Did anyone besides me think the question in the title was about actual zebras and whether their stripes were an effective camouflage?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A simply phrased problem about entries in a table results in an error rate of over 10%. And people use tables like these to do their jobs? No wonder my life is dominated by fixing other people's mistakes.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Mod parent down. This text was stolen from here .
I don't understand why the summary tries to pan zebra striping even though they admit it is a small improvement. What were they expecting, a revolution in instant data access? It's pretty hypocritical on a site filled with people who worry about optimizing milliseconds from subroutines.
I find it helps more *after* you find the data you were looking for, especially as the number of columns increases. It keeps your eyes from straying to a different row as you move across the row.
For example, there might be column data for "Name", "DOB", and "Comments". So I can find the name I'm looking for pretty quickly, but as I move over to the "Comments" section (which could be far away to the right), the "Zebra striping" helps your eyes stay in the row of the "Name" you found.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
One special case in which odd/even line zebra striping can make a HUGE difference in readibility lies in detail sections where each item consists of two or more lines.
Michael Long yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada
Doctor yada
James Brown yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada
Musician yada
Robert Downy yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada
Actor yada
In such cases, zerbra striping can make a huge difference in determining that the information in line 4 actually goes with the information in line 3.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
There were six questions in the study. Those with low error rates were omitted from the analysis. The error rates were:
Q1 2%
Q2 2%
Q3 12%
Q4 7%
Q5 2%
Q6 9%
The author then decides, after the experiment, to delete Q1,Q2,Q4,Q5 from the analysis.
Why is Q4 any different from Q6?! The paper does not even report the results on Q4 so we can do the math ourselves.
Ah, yes, I remember those times well as I look at the alternating stripes on the uniform dad wears at the federal pen, where he's currently serving 5-10 for corporate espionage. . .
;-)
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
It's been done for years :-) The catch is finding a pin-feeder for your laser printer...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The difference is there.. The Zebra stripes don't help the top 2 or the bottom 2, only the middle two. so the questioned only needed to count to three in either direction to get their bearings. do this with a 50 line document, and I'm betting that the difference will magnify.. increase the distance left-right by printing landscape, and watch it zebra strut it's stuff.
Why was the zebra eaten?
Because it made the lions cross..
darkviolet
blue
skyblue
lightskyblue
darkviolet
blue
skyblue
lightskyblue
- grouping, sorting,....
- first of every 3/4 rows is bold/italic or +1pt
(depends on web application)
(These may also be worth considering depending on nature of web app...
- columns with different fonts....
- borders for *each group-of-four*: 1px 0px 1px 0px
- see autoformat templates in OO.org spreadhseets
- floating tooltip with more info / coloring-hacks
- hover / onmouseover a la phpMyAdmin
- [your bright CSS hack here]
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
Dyslexia is a language impairment. It has nothing to do with visual perception. It is not, as was once thought, "seeing letters backward.)
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
which is where the benefit lies. PS - slashdo
I bet they didn't have many, if any, testers with dyslexia. Tightly stacked columns of data are easy to mix up, zebra stripes as least give some visual reference that your eyes didn't "slip" as you read across.
This topic is about as engaging as a trip to the local box factory. (No, they're not assembled here...They're assembled in Flint, Michigan. And not for anything cool...Only for nails).
Hard to believe that this study was measuring the right thing.
Zebra striping has two big advantages. The first is the obvious one of scanning across columns, to keep your eye following the row. The second is when you have to look away from the page and back, where it helps find which row you were looking at.
Arguably an alternating color is not optimal (since it is possible to accidentally jump across two rows). That is why many people prefer say only zebra striping every third or fourth row. That way, the next row that has the same relationship to a stripe is much further away.
Obviously zebra striping is not that useful if there are only a few rows or columns, because in that case your eye can use the edge of the table/page as the reference point. But on a large sheet of paper (or a screen), the edges are too far away to act as reference points, and the zebra stripe is useful.
Doesn't have to be zebra striping either. Could just be the occasional thicker line divider. But zebra stripes (with pale colours) are an aesthetically pleasing way to do it.
Regarding row hover, I agree in general, but there is a problem: that creates an expectation that the row should DO something. On the web, highlighting something when moused over usually indicates a link (for those designers who don't think links should be obvious all the time).
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
It is my assumption, which is very likely true, that zebra striping makes only a little increase in accuracy and speed WHEN THE PEOPLE BEING TESTED ARE ADAPTED TO AND EXPECTING SPECIFIC PRESENTATIONS OF DATA. The research is most likely flawed in that the subjects were, in repetition, tested on zebra and non-zebra formats, not taking into account that the subjects are becoming adapted to the overall format of the data. Thus, subjects are experienced/trained in acquiring the data with or without the striping, which would then show very little difference. Oh... and this whole research serves little to no purpose. What a waste of time. Why not focus research on something more important?
The best striping I've seen was in the AD&D books in 2nd edition - instead of single rows, they did groups of three rows in alternate colours. This really helps on wide tables as thick stripes are easier to follow and you know if you're looking at the top, middle, or bottom value within that stripe.
but that thing does help when u need to follow something outta screen
Then it can be taken a step further by providing a function for that expectation: when the user clicks a highlighted row, all other rows are ghosted.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Just thought you might be interested to learn that according to some print professionals and members of the Business Forms Management Association (http://www.bfma.org), zebra striped paper (i.e. green paper) was introduced originally as a way for paper companies to increase market share for their product. That is, zebra striping was a way to differentiate Company A's paper from Company B's - there is no record of it being introduced for reasons of usability.
I stand by my assertion that whilst there are low level principles that support the use of zebra striping (e.g. the Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception), there has been no research to confirm that zebra striping actually helps, in either the paper or electronic medium. This lack of scientific research is important because what is helpful to you and I (and I certainly like zebra striping over plain), may be visual noise or otherwise problematic to another user. Those of you who follow Edward Tufte will know what I mean.
I believe it is healthy to carefully and impartially check our assumptions and habits. Data that supports our design decisions helps us justify them to stakeholders.
Regards,
Jessica
http://formulate.com.au/
You'll never look at forms the same way again.
I use zebra-like striping. 3 rows are light, next 3 rows dark. You can easily locate a row in the appropriate triad. Beats zebra striping.
a wider font like Verdana is also highly recommended.
thanks