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You dont have to read between the lines here....reinforces what you already knew.
Off to change my css:)
After the recent thread aboutt font sizes and CSS I've changed over to CSS and px font sizes
So much information for what you would think to be a simple matter, the font displayed on the screen :)
The surpise to me was Courier. I may have a use for Courier in another application.
No suprise was Times New Roman being way down. Serif fonts don't scale well in browsers and always look awkward.
1. The Courier data is paradoxical - it shows the LONGEST reading times but very high perceived legibility anyway.
2. Tahoma and Times both show faster reading times than Arial or any other font. How about that! -- Times beats Arial in actual reading time. I didn't expect that, except for the known fact that serifs make letterforms more quickly recognizable.
3. Perception overrules actual measurement in this study. Makes me wonder how much that's true in other areas of usability.
Serif fonts are known to be better for reading in the high resolution of print; they suffer on the web somewhat because of low resolution. Although I don't often credit Microsoft, they did an outstanding job in the development of their special set of core web fonts (Verdana, Comic Sans, Georgia, etc.):
[microsoft.com...]
These were designed from scratch with screen usability in mind, and one of the most important features they share is a large x-height. What person that you've never heard of has had the greatest impact on the web? I'd say Matthew Carter.
One thing that particularly frustrated me in the above study was failure to take leading into account. One of the most important factors in the readability of a page is the leading, especially with serif fonts. Stick
line-height: 1.33. Perception overrules actual measurement in this study. Makes me wonder how much that's true in other areas of usability.
It's true in many areas. A classic example concerns how long users are comfortable waiting for something. If some processing action takes 10 seconds and the screen just sits there, users will be very uncomfortable. If you add a watch or hourglass cursor while the processing is taking place they can wait 15 seconds for the same thing and be much more comfortable. The Macintosh User Interface Guidelines, available from Amazon and elsewhere, are chock full of important usability principles that apply across platforms; a copy should be on every designer's shelf.
What about the IQ of the people tested, the speed at which they normally read, how much sleep they had the night before etc?
There is not much control over the whole affair.
However, those fonts that take longer to read, perhaps they are better when explaining technical subjects??
Agreed -- many things yet to be studied in web usability. On the main page for these usability studies [psychology.wichita.edu] we're talking about, they say this:
If you have a research study that you would like to do, but don't have the time or resources, please contact us. We will do the research for you.
> One of the most important factors in the readability of a page is the leading
Right on the money -- and a long established for the print world. Check out this page on the same site for an example of how tough it can be to read when line-height is set too small. For some foolish reason it's set to 100% here (bad news for a usability website!)
Internet Attitude article [psychology.wichita.edu]
I wouldn't rate it much higher than asking a bunch of mates which they prefer.
Sorry, but Mr Picky is at home today.
Figure 6 -- there's a rapid increase in reading speeds when going from from 12 point to 14 point sans-serif type. 14 points is a lot bigger than most sites tend to use (or than most designers think looks good!)
The section that follows Figure 6 talks about optimum length for a single line. It draws from print research, but still is very illuminating for web usability. The major factor is the "return sweep" the reader's eye must make at the end of every line.
Horton recommends that lines should be limited to lengths of around 40 to 60 characters, which is approximately 11 words per line. A study by Huey (1968) tends to support this in his finding that shorter line lengths or approximately 4" (10 cm) are more accurate on the return sweep than longer line lengths.Moreover, Gregory and Pouton (1970) state that people with poor reading ability performed better when the line length was approximately seven words.
