White Space Matters

So far today I’ve read two really good articles dealing with web analytics: Metrics and Dimensions and Reports — Oh My! from the Omniture blog and The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Web Analytics and Measurement from UX Booth.

But seeing these two articles open in adjacent tabs lead me to do some side by side comparisons. I noticed my gut reaction the the Omniture blog was “I don’t want to read all that!” The UX Booth article was considerably longer, but it didn’t illicit such a knee jerk reaction. I think the reason for this is white space. UX Booth gives their content a bit more room to breath.

Screen Shots

The following screen shots show the first 910-ish characters of content. I attempted to preserve the white space between this content and off screen elements. I’m using PNG-8 to avoid jpg compression making the text fuzzy. The downside is the photo from Oniture ends up looking a bit off. My fault, not theirs. Also, Blogger appears to be scaling these images to be the same width. The Omniture Blog screen shot is actually about 20px wider, for what that’s worth.

Omniture Blog

UX Booth

Counting Pixels

The textual content here are within 5 characters of each other, 912 characters for Omniture vs. 907 characters for UX Booth. Both spend some screen real estate on supplementary content, a photo or a table of contents. But I find the UX Booth content much more inviting. And by my count they use about a third more pixels to present their content.

What Do You Think?

Do you notice a difference anything like what I’m talking about? Or am I “putting the ‘anal’ in analytics” to borrow a phrase from the Omniture blog? Either way, the quality of the content in both cases is top notch. Definitely worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing.