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."

Re:It looks nice

[couchslug]

If your are PRINTING a checklist for use outdoors, at night, etc striped tables IMO work MUCH better for checklists. In the Air Force we used them for generation checklists (scan down task lists at the side vs tail
numbers at the top) to fill in times.

Why it didn't help...

[BytePusher]

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."

Re:Why it didn't help...

[BytePusher]

correction: switch rows with columns in my post.

I can tell you why it didn't help. They formatted their table with large spaces between columns and they had only 9 columns. If they tried the same study where they also varied the number of columns I am sure they would find that as the columns 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."

Not enough data to answer the question!

[elwinc]

The experimental design is good, and I'm glad the experiment was done, but the conclusion of the paper is that there's not enough data to answer the question!

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.

Re:Yes and No.

[WhiteDragon]

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.

In Firefox, when looking at html tables, you can hold down ctrl and select the row. I find this to be fairly helpful.

Re:Do Zebra Stripes Actually Help?

[WhiplashII]

Except...

Please remember that some of us are colorblind!

(I was trying to start the "Meet the Robinsons" Blue Ray disk the other day, and couldn't find the "Play" option. It seems some genius over there made the text green on white, and therefor invisible to me...)