UX Design of the week – the art of digital book browsing

Lara Williams, Editor-at-large

What’s caught our eye in the world of UX Design this week?

This is a new weekly post showcasing our favourite things from the world of UX Design. Whether that’s a great new app, interface or article, if it’s here – we like it.

This week, we found ourselves enchanted by the ease in which HAWRAF’s new project made reading long passages online enjoyable.

Digital Book Browsing

Reading a book or long pieces of text on your desktop browser is a far from friendly user experience. Yet New York-based design studio HAWRAF has managed to instil a bit of charm into digital book browsing.

Source: HAWRAF

Their design is specifically created for Taeyoon Choi’s book Poetic Computation: Reader, a book that explores code as a form of poetry.

And reading it does, indeed, feel like poetry. It allows the reader to customise everything, including the font, letter size and spacing – even the colour of the page. One mode allows the book to be read out to you instead, and a focus mode blocks out all but a small portion of the text, preventing a user’s wandering eyes from losing concentration and switching tabs.

Source: HAWRAF

Does it combine the best of paper with the perks of digital? Try it for yourself, but we think it’s delightful.