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Figure 7.5: You can use greeking for content if you don't have it yet or don't want users to
be distracted by detail that's irrelevant to what you're testing.
You've probably seen greeking that uses the words "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ..." which
is actually Latin, and faked Latin at that, so I have no clue why it's called greeking. The
classic lorem ipsum wording was concocted so that its ascenders, descenders, and word
lengths would approximate English text. Thus, it makes better filler material for screen
layouts than "text text text" or "content here." Greeking is sometimes used on Web pages
with the assumption that someone else is taking care of the content—as a search on
"lorem ipsum" will reveal, sometimes this assumption is mistaken!
When people first learn about greeking, they're often tempted to overuse it. The previous examples
should be considered as tactics to use in special cases rather than something you'd do as a matter of
course. Don't greek parts of the interface that are relevant to what you're trying to test. For example, in
a drop-down menu, you wouldn't want to greek all the choices except the one you want the user to
select—that makes the task artificially easy, and you might fail to learn something important. It's also
important in many cases to have realistic content in the prototype because it's interesting to watch
users make decisions based on that content.
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