Niki Marathia
Previous
UX of text
Week 1 of 2
Team
Text is everywhere; on screens, in books, in bodies, on walls. We read it, write it, scroll past it, speak it aloud. Text can be formal or fragmented, poetic or practical, loud or invisible. It carries meaning, shapes behaviour and builds connection. It is both container and content. Design an experience that reveals the materiality of text.

Research methods:
Affinity diagramming, data physicalisation
Andre Dinis
Eric Chen
Eryue Wan
Kai Lin
Luis Winkelbrandt
Niki Marathia

We started the project by discussing what interested us about text that we thought we could explore further.

Figure 1. Our areas of interest regarding text.


We also thought about what kinds of text we might want to focus on, as well as the interactions it might involve.

Figure 2. Considering the kinds of text we were interested in and ways to interact with it. Drawn by Kai Lin.


We then read passages from three of the works referenced in the brief and summarised them for the rest of the team, so we all had a basic understanding of them. The reading that stuck with us the most was Sue Walker’s (2001) Typography and Language in Everyday Life. To explore design in ordinary language, Walker uses examples in letter-writing. She considers how a receiver is addressed, whether the letter is written on blank or lined paper, and the kind of envelope used, to determine how formality can be conveyed in written form. 

Figure 3. Some of our take-aways from the books referenced in the project brief.


This made us want to understand how typography interacts with everyday language. We wondered why people organise their writing the way they do and what influences their choices. We thought that note-taking would be an interesting area to look for answers to these questions. To understand the qualities of a notebook, and subsequently of the notes it contains, we did an artefact analysis of my notebook.

Figure 4. Artefact analysis of a notebook: front cover, inside pages, back cover. Taken by Andre Dinis.


We considered the notebook’s material, aesthetic, and interactive elements, as well as the context in which it is being used in. As part of these observations, we took note of how the writing is organised inside (e.g. dates at the top of the page), what kind of paper is used for the cover and pages, and where it is kept when in use and out of use.

Figure 5a. Aesthetic and material elements of a notebook.
Figure 5b. Interactive elements of a notebook.
Figure 5c. Context (of use) of a notebook.

We wanted to compare the qualities of a notebook with those of the Apple Notes app, to see if and where they share similarities. To achieve this, we did an artefact analysis of the Notes app. Amongst our observations, we recorded that it has no purely decorative features, notes can be password protected, and an option to pin notes makes browsing through them easy.

Figure 6. Material, aesthetic, and interactive qualities of the Notes app.


We found its simple user interface is similar to a notebook in the sense that it resembles a clean slate.

Figure 7. Screenshots of the Notes app user interface.


Affinity Diagramming

We transferred our artefact analysis observations into post-it notes, so we could identify relationships by categorising them.

Figure 8a. Writing our post-it notes from our artefact analysis observations.
Figure 8b. Categorising our post-it notes by identifying relationships between them.
‘Organising’ was the main category that emerged. This refers to the organisation of ideas through visual layout, but also functionality like moving notes into folders and pinning them. 

Figure 9. The categories emerged through affinity diagramming.


Privacy and typography were also prominent categories that we found interesting. Our affinity diagramming led us to question:

What are notes used for? 
Who uses them?
For what?
Where? 
How?
When do they use them?

We put all questions that came up for us on a figjam, so we could vote on which we wanted to investigate further (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Ranking questions that emerged through our affinity diagramming.


The two winners were ‘what typographic rules do people unconsciouslly follow in notes?’ and ‘does the look of a set of notes demonstrate the person’s self-image?’. We found the second question to be too abstract for us to investigate within the two-week timeframe, so we decided to take the first one forward. It was also going back to Sue Walker’s (2001) ideas about visual organisation in everyday language, so this felt like the right choice.

Figure 11. Narrowing down our areas of interest regarding note-taking.


As a way of revealing relationships in typography and note-taking, we traced old notes from our notebooks and overlaid them over a torch light. Although we found this looked beautiful, we were not satisfied by repurposing old notes because they lacked a common theme, making it harder to look for patterns. That is how we decided to collect notes through a workshop.

Figure 12a. Overlaying our notes on tracing paper. Taken by Andre Dinis and Luis Winkelbrandt.
Figure 12b. Using a light to see through all the layers. Taken by Andre Dinis and Luis Winkelbrandt.
We selected a short online lecture for this purpose. I asked four of my friends to help with this, instructing them to take notes on an A5 piece of paper as if they planned to revisit them later. The lecture was six minute long and it was about whether robots should look after the elderly (Taylor, 2025).

Figure 13. Instructions for our note-taking workshop.


Figure 14a. Four of our participants taking notes.
Figure 14b. Six minute lecture about whether robots should take care of the elderly.
SourcesTaylor, H. (2025). Human Knowledge, Robotics, and AI - Should Robots Look After the Elderly?. Available at: https://massolit.io/courses/human-knowledge-robotics-and-ai (Accessed: 5 January 2026).

Walker, S. (2001). Typography and Language in Everyday Life: Prescriptions and Practices. Routledge.