Capitalizing texts in user interface

Question

I\'d like to ask you if there is a reason to capitalize all items in menus, etc in application user interface, for example

• File->Page Setup
• Edit->Select

Answer 1

From a usability standpoint, title-style capitalization (capitalizing the first letter of each word) increases the conspicuousness of the non-initial words in a caption. This may help users more quickly find key words in a caption to identify and discriminate menu items. For example compare:

• Page Setup
• Page View

Versus:

• Page setup
• Page view

Ideally, this is unnecessary because your menu captions should begin with their key discriminating words, but sometimes that just doesn’t make acceptable captions.

In the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, title-style is standard for menu items (and commmand/push buttons). Title-style was also standard for MS Windows until Vista, when the Windows User Experience guidelines switched from recommending title-style to sentence-style (capitalize only the first letter of the initial word) for many situations, including menu captions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511502.aspx). I think this was part of an effort to give applications a conversational webby “inductive” style, where the options are phrased as commands sentences (e.g., “Create a power plan,” “Do this for all current items”).

Personally, I would avoid such wordier UIs for apps, especially for those regularly used by users, and thus by extension stick with title-style. More words adds clutter and more reading slows users down. In fact, users are inclined to skip large blocks of text since reading takes so long, so adding words often functionally reduces clarity.

Answer 2

Because menus are usually formatted like titles in English. In a title, the first word is always capitalized, as well as any nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and pronouns. If they are not the first word in the Title, articles and prepositions are not generally capitalized.

Answer 3

In English, generally titles have all words capitalised except for conjunctions (of, for, and etc.) and prepositions (like with.) User interface elements (buttons, titles, menu items) are formatted like titles.

I have a piece of software I'm using right now which has a "Tasks" menu and 3 items as follows:

• New task
• Delete Task
• Task Properties

The difference in capitalisation on "new task" stands out a mile for me - it just doesn't look "correct."

Answer 4

I'm currently in a running argument with a colleague about this. I'm probably in the Apple camp in terms of UI standards, and he is squarely in the Microsoft camp. Microsoft lately has been pushing Downstyle (the name I see from time to time regarding the practice, particularly involving headlines, of only capitalising the first letter). My colleague claims that it 'tests well'. Users (not surprisingly) can read text faster when it there are No Capitals On Every Word to stumble over. However, I believe that this should not be a reason to use it for User Interface elements. I think there is a reason for this, but it might be tricky to test.

When users are testing a piece of software (or a website) that they've never seen before, they are primarily reading everything (including the UI). They read 'Show all replies' faster than 'Show All Replies'. However, after a period of time, I believe that users switch to not reading UI elements, but relying on faster methods of acquiring the target that they are going to click on, such as location or shape. In this case, 'Show All Replies' is easier to pick out because it displays as a less ambiguous shape than 'Show all replies' does (squinting your eyes will probably show this). The argument that it tests better because users can read it faster falls apart because users are not reading buttons and menus, but matching something they want to the memory of that thing. Probably the right way to test this is to see if users start out slower in Upstyle than with Downstyle, but have an easier time with repeated access, eventually surpassing the Downstyle.

If you want to see a site that uses a lot of Downstyle in the UI, check out Outlook.com or OneDrive.com, both of which are Microsoft products. It seems to be to be pretty apparent that the use of Downstyle is dismal failure on these sites, and I'm not saying this because I'm 'used to' UpStyle (after all, 20+ years of seeing the opposite can create some pretty strong cognitive 'noise' in my perceptions). Nevertheless, I think it fails because the use of thin Helvetica Extra Light text for everything, reliance on rollovers for pointing out nearly every clickable thing (all of which is not available to a tablet user) and general flatness to an extreme (not a single drop shadow, even where it would help to disambiguate a pseudo drop-down menu) make for a UI that is much harder to use than it ought to be.

So my advice is, stay with title-case (Upstyle), unless you want your site to look like a Microsoft site, until they see the error of their ways and redesign it to look the way they used to (which was like everyone else).