Slashdot Mirror
MIT Researchers Show Dash Font Choice Affects Distraction
bdking writes "A typeface family commonly found on the devices installed in many modern cars is more likely to cause drivers to spend more time looking away from the road than an alternative typeface tested in two studies, according to new research from MIT's AgeLab."
It seems that the closed letter forms of Grotesque type faces require slightly more time to read than open letter forms of Humanist type faces, just enough that it could be problematic at highway speeds.
I just bought a new car a few months ago, and I've definitely noticed my driving style is entirely different now.
I'm all about a simple dash, a stick shift, and few distractions; driving is one of the few times that I can sit down and focus non stop on something.
In my new car, I find my self having to fight bad habits of fiddling with the radio and all the extra gizmos my car has.
Well it wouldn't matter if you weren't texting while doing 70 on the highway! :-)
ok, I am sure the article is about the fonts on the dashboard or something like that but really, the number of drivers I see texting while they are rolling a ton of metal along at high speeds is ridiculous.
Serif fonts are easier to read than sans-serif fonts?
Who would have thought it!
Bloody graphic designers. They'll join the lawyers, bankers, patent trolls, advertising shills, dodgy stock traders and so on up against the wall when the revolution comes!!!
Hmmmmm - its going to be an effin big wall, or we're going to have to operate in shifts to clear the backlog.......
That's an interesting find but in my personal opinion when it comes to driving I think the more voice based it goes, the better it is. Looking at dials and screens is always distracting and more often than not can prove fatal.
So what font should you choose on your web site ? I note some research that Making things hard to read 'can boost learning'; so should I use a serif or sans-serif font for my web site ? I suppose it depends on the purpose of my web site.
(...)
Everyone loves Comic Sans.
Then all drivers will be happy, smiley and give way to old ladies.
Did anybody else think this post was going to be about hyphens?
My research shows that signs with BOOBS in them, whether this is just women showing off their BOOBS on the roadside (which is, for some odd reason, quite common in Denmark)...is the main source of distraction. ...Now, show me a typeface that will affect YOUR distraction away from the BOOB-signs.
Wher's the control group with the CD holder on the sun visor, or the console and floorboard full of cassette tapes?
Hell, even just a damn blank dash -- Who's to say we don't just find excuses to look away from the road: There are side windows full of billboards...
Taking things to extremes...anyone who bothers to read your site will either be educated and Jewish, a theologian or extremely determined. Very high learning and retention rate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm blind you insensitive clods, the typeface in all cars should be braille and nothing else.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Driving through a small town in Wiltshire, England yesterday, while waiting at lights I saw a young black woman wearing a red dress and coat and red shoes. She was quite stunningly beautiful. I'm surprised there wasn't a multiple pile up. Distraction can take many forms. Fortunately by the time the lights changed I had finished thinking about art history and trying to remember which painting it was that was nagging at the back of my mind. But it doesn't take boobs to create distractions.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What ever happened to plain ICONS on the dashboard? When did we start adding words, AND WHY?
Either one will work in terms of selecting a more educated, judisk, and desireable readership.
But it's still a very important question, which?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Microsoft's greatest success was to ensure that the typesetting got done by the document creator and not the document viewer, thus preserving the market for the world's most unnecessary program - Word - forever. Raging against it is a bit too late now.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Drivers should to pay attention to the road in front of them - not some cutesy in-car display that Madison Avenue portrays as "useful" while driving.
The summary links to Grotesque, but what they use in the article is "Square Grotesque", a modified version which is _really_ square and IMHO hard to read (and which apprently quite appreciated by car manufacturers). Concluding every Grotesque font is hard to read is definitely not what the research demonstrated.
The best is to have a look at the paper, which has good examples. A similar font can be found on wikipedia there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile (but I find this one is still slightly easier to read).
Read the PDF, people, damn it, before jumping to conclusions.
The fonts used in the experiment were Eurostile as the grotesque and Frutiger as the humanist. Both of those are sans serif.
This is about shapes, form and spacing.
Eurostile is a pretty terrible font.
They shall rediscover it's blessings, again and again, each time as if new. And the world shall fall flat, and laugh uproriously, at such ignorance, and such arrogance. These people are actually expecting people will believe this BS, no?
*ROFL*
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Reading the original white paper, (http://agelab.mit.edu/files/AgeLab_typeface_white_paper_2012.pdf) a salient feature is definitely, for all tasks, all measurements, all graphics: women react noticeably faster --and by far...
Then the poor guys indeed have a different lag time according to the font, OK...
Herve S.
Gotta get that kerning right.
Oh boy, I probably just killed Wednesday for a lot of people. Gooooodbye productivity! And website likely.
They should follow it up with work on the effect of presenting scientific findings through the medium of a video which continually shifts from one person's speech to another, with each speaker rarely allowed more than one sentence before the voiceover or another speaker continues the thread of their message, or some floating text is slowly revealed as it drifts across the screen. It's probably received wisdom that floating images, continual movement on the screen, and cutting between different presenters holds the attention of an audience, but there's a clear difference between getting eyes-on-screen-for-as-long-as-possible, and communicating a moderately sophisticated message. Maybe I'm too old for this shit.
First "Grotesk" font listed on wiki:
Akzidenz Grotesk (1896)
that's some prescient shit!
This has been "tested" around 2002 in Norway. A car registration plate font redesign was conducted to make all plates issued from that moment look more modern and stylish and a font similar to Eurostile were implemented. All in the name of creating a mono-space font which would make all plates equal width. ("IL 111111" would be just as wide as "MW 123456")
Result: Numbers 3, 6, 8 and 9 went from being easily distinguishable at 80m+ to be undreadable by speed and toll cameras. You could pass speed cameras with little risk of getting fined and drive on any toll road for free. Sombody else would end up with the bill due to the misreading of the license plates.
Scroll down to see examples here:
http://www.typografi.org/bilskilt/bilskilt.html
In 2004 they decided to go for Myriad with variable white-spacing instead. This has not yet been implemented :)
Do the have the wisdom of all fonts?
... the problem is that one has to look away from the road to see the screen.
Drivers do not look at speedometers. Why should they? After all they can instinctively drive at just below the speed limit under all conditions.
I find it amusing that we needed MIT researchers to discover what a good designer with typographic experience could have told you. It's fundamentally not that much different than the thinking that has to go into selecting fonts for road signs. It's what drove the recent change from Highway Gothic to Clearview.
The problem is when designers and their managers are driven by being different and place the emphasis on style over functionality. Part of the challenge is selecting the right font for an implementation. Serif fonts are actually easier to read when dealing with large amounts of copy, but for quick identification a round sans-serif font with clear open space is more effective. The goal is to have a font with letters that are as distinct as possible. Of course there are added challenges when dealing with displays. A basic low-res display is going to limit options considerably.
That said, a far bigger problem than type selection is usability of the system. Touchscreens are the absolute worse type of interface because they demand full attention to operate. Even those operated by knobs and buttons, requiring menu navigation demand too much attention. It's become a fad to ditch other kinds of controls in favor of buttons, leading to consoles crammed with them and no real consideration for their placement. Physical controls need to be grouped in logically related clusters, and dials should be used more extensively. Hell, I think there's a good argument for toggle switches.
Operation by touch alone should be the goal.
I'm too lazy to read the article.
Did they do a comparison between the time required to read the whole screen (new driver) and the time it takes to parse the screen to just find the information you are interested in (current MPG)?
When I bought my Chevy Sonic in November 2011, it took me a while to get used to the digital dashboard display. It just seemed to take too long to get the information from it that I was interested in. In time, I got used to the layout, and my eyes go directly to the part of the screen that contains the information that I am interested in, and I process the information as my eyes go back to the road.
What I'm trying to express is that fonts only really make a difference until you are used to the presentation format. Then, as long as the format stays the same, and you've absorbed the character set, it really doesn't matter so much. The only difference then is with the new driver.
So continues a recent tradition in the auto industry of poor interface design: replacing speedometer dials - easy to read approximately but quickly - with digital speed displays which give unnecessarily precise information; replacing tactile radio buttons with digital displays and moving numerous other devices that could be used without looking at them to a (single point of failure) screen that requires taking ones eyes off the road.
I clicked through out of pure curiosity over how a hyphen would be rendered differently in serif vs sans-serif...
and left disappointed =(
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
if the car is designed right, you don't.
I can think of a lot of automakers that should be sued for this, starting with BMW, the leaders of the plot to fiddle and look away from the road instead of drive, and periodically drop a hand to a switch that is right where it should be.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?