Discuss: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?
by Jessica Enders
- Editorial Comments
22 Why were they invented?
I’m curious as to why Zebra Stripes were invented in the first place. I would image that they were created to solve a problem — that is, the need to organize data more efficiently. Given that it was a solution to a problem, and adopted wide-scale, I would image that Zebra Stripes are a positive. Maybe more testing?? :-)
Kris
posted at 02:57 pm on May 6, 2008 by Kristopher LaGreca
23 Hover hilightling
I find (and this is entirely personal) that having a hover state for rows helps with readability quite a bit, it’s like the digital equivalent of using your finger to scan through a list.
I think a hover state is further enhanced without zebra stripes because it’s the lone alternate color that pops, however it might not be much of a difference with zebra stripes if the hover color contrasts well with the zebra stripes.
posted at 03:10 pm on May 6, 2008 by Devon Mitton
24 What does the plain table look like?
I’m assuming those thin cell borders were eliminated on the plain table. Since they exist on the zebra striped table, I’m not even sure anymore.
posted at 03:11 pm on May 6, 2008 by Sal Sen
25 @23: My Bad
- Misspelled “Highlighting” in the title
14 and15 already talked about highlighting.
- Remember to read the comments before making myself look like an idiot.
posted at 03:15 pm on May 6, 2008 by Devon Mitton
26 There were no cell borders
Thanks everyone for taking the time to read and comment on my article.
I need to explain that in the original study, the table did NOT have any cell borders, regardless of whether it was ‘plain’ or ‘striped’. The table you are seeing in this article is a REPRODUCTION of the original. I have asked ALA to put up a screen shot of the original table, to help clarify things, but in the interim you can get it from the full paper which is linked to in the article.
I would also like to clarify two things. Firstly, I am not claiming that zebra striping never helps. You’ll see that towards the end of the article I recognise that “this was just one experiment, with one dataset”.
I wholeheartedly agree with Paul A that there are more questions raised than there are answered – this is often the case in research. My aim in conducting at least one follow up study is to explore some of these questions. Moreover, the original study did test one the most commonly used approaches, the use of light grey shading.
However, I have to say that I think one study is better than none, which was the state of affairs when I went exploring the issue last year.
Secondly, the study found that in this case, there was no statistically significant improvement in accuracy and there was a statistically significant improvement in speed in only some situations. As a statistician I know that NOT finding a statistically significant difference does NOT mean that there isn’t true difference, if that makes any sense. It may just be that the we haven’t found the conditions in which there is a difference.
@Andrew I: I agree that one reason why a strong improvement in accuracy and speed was not found could be the length of the study. In the full research paper, I have posited that perhaps the reason why the sixth question is the only one with a statistically significant difference is because fatigue is starting to set in. I hope to explore the issue of fatigue more in the future.
Tiago R: You might be interested to know that in the past there was some use of more than one colour for paper print outs, e.g. green row, white row, orange row, white row. One obvious problem with this approach is that it may not work for users who have trouble distinguishing colour. It could also may be more burdensome than helpful, because of the cognitive load associated with processing colour.
Trek G & Julian L: I agree that in some environments, zebra striping is not time consuming. However, not everyone is working in those environments. But more importantly, I don’t think we should be doing something out of habit, without having hard evidence that it actually helps.
posted at 03:20 pm on May 6, 2008 by Jessica Enders
27 Asking Web professionals to participate?
While I find this study interesting, and I’m fascinated by the number of comment it’s already received, I’d like to raise a different concern. In particular, I’m concerned about the appeal for new study participants in an article like this. A List Apart reaches a wide audience of people with personal interest in the outcome of such a study, and I worry that many such people could use their own bias to skew the results of the study.
Think about it. If I hate zebra tables (personally, I’m in the ambivalent 33%), I could head over to the study, and intentionally take a long time on the zebra striped table, then knowingly give an incorrect answer, in hopes of “proving” that zebra tables are harmful. Conversely, if I love zebra tables, I could help skew the results against plain tables.
In addition to looking into things like fatigue and data density, I think you’d need to make sure to target data workers who are truly looking for the best presentation for the data they have to use. Asking the people who implement these tables to help determine their efficacy is just asking for trouble.
posted at 03:28 pm on May 6, 2008 by Marty Alchin
28 Eye tracking & follow up study
@Sean Ryan: Thanks for taking the time to do the follow up study.
I don’t want to give too much about that study away, to avoid biasing others who are yet to do it, but I want to clarify that I deliberately made the study hard. I need to get higher errors rates than the original study.
I disagree that working from the number back to the country is “not a striping problem, but a sorting issue”. Once you have found the number, you need to move left along the row to find the associated country – this is precisely where zebra striping may or may not help.
I also disagree that the only reliable way to find out whether zebra striping works is to do an eye tracking study. Suppose you conduct such a study and find that people’s eyes are travelling, left to right, along a row. How do you know whether they are “using” the zebra striping to do this? Eye tracking only shows where participants are looking, not what they are seeing or processing.
Note that the methodology used in the follow up study is different from the original study, in order to answer some of those new questions that Paul Armstrong refers to.
posted at 03:31 pm on May 6, 2008 by Jessica Enders
29 But you're web professionals!
@Marty Alchin
I would certainly hope that web professionals would be professional enough not to try to skew the study results in the way you describe. Don’t we all want good data on which to base our design decisions?
posted at 03:33 pm on May 6, 2008 by Jessica Enders
30 Try using borderless rows.
I think zebra striping gets its value in tables where you don’t have borders under every table row. Take for example the iTunes image posted, using zebra stripes certainly makes it easier to group relevant information in the table, without the need for ugly borders. I would like to see a similar study using tables without row-borders, but still clear and easy to read tables. I think the results would be more relevant to the web design world. Or even better, 4 tables, 2 w/borders, 2 w/out, and each pair having one striped and one not. That would really help the web design world come up with the best solution for displaying tabular data.
posted at 03:38 pm on May 6, 2008 by T.J. L
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21 Untitled
In addition to the above comments and criticisms, at first I thought the table in the article was the un-striped version – the contrast between the two sets of rows was so small that they appeared almost identical (at least on my screen, and to my eyes).
I’m sure the level of contrast between the stripes must play a part in it’s effectiveness, and I’d have thought such a small difference in contrast would be fairly ineffective in highlighting the alternate rows.
posted at 02:56 pm on May 6, 2008 by Luke Noel-Storr