Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

This familiar Latin phrase has been used by designers since the 1500's. According to www.lipsum.com (a site I use rather frequently to get text passages to paste into screen designs) the text comes from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) written in 45 BC by Cicero (two years before his murder by Mark Antony). That's probably more than you wanted to know but I'm a sucker for trivia.

The rationale for the text, according to the site, is that it has "a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English."

Like many designers, I often use lorum ipsum text when presenting screen designs to clients. The idea is to keep them from getting distracted by the content. No matter how often or strongly I point out that the text on the screen is simply a "placeholder," some people are drawn to it and seem compelled to focus on the content to the detriment of the screen design.

But recently, I've become less happy with lorum ipsum as a solution.

What I've found is that screens with meaningless text often lose the impact that they would have if they sported real content. Perhaps the fact that some people find it almost impossible to disengage from the content indicates just how powerful content is in shaping our reaction to the designs.  So I’ve started to wonder if showing screen designs without content is likely to bias their response as well.

Remember that lorum ipsum started as a printer’s convenience. It is easy to see how a page layout can benefit from it. But printed pages are static. Readers don’t have to decide where to click. And while they may scan for sentences of interest, the text (at least in English) starts at the top left and progresses to the right and down.

Screens are not static and it’s a bad assumption that users will read them as they do books. Instead they will scan the screens to identify areas or objects of interest. And content plays a large role in determining what is interesting.

Did you ever visit a housing development and look at the "model houses?"  If the models are unfurnished, they look cold. If they are furnished,  buyers may be swayed by how well they like the furniture and decorations.

I don’t have an answer to this dilemma (sorry). It seems as if you are damned if you do and equally damned if you don’t.

But the conclusion that I am drawing is that when it comes to screen design, content and structure are not as independent and separable than we might at first think. And evaluating the true impact of a design on users may require the presence of meaningful content, not just text filler.