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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.
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
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?
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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.
If it's been known for centuries, wouldn't you think that the hard to read type faces would have long since been scrapped?
And why are there so many font fanatics still making the tiny subtle changes, then rushing of to show them off to other font fanatics, followed by much gushing, and quibbling, followed by copyright cat fights?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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*
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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.
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?
This research deals with the shapes, proportions, and spacing of characters in square grotesque and humanist typefaces. It doesn't have anything to do with serifs.
If it's been known for centuries, wouldn't you think that the hard to read type faces would have long since been scrapped?
They're not "hard to read". Just not so easy, and often, as in a headline or a label, slowing you down to pay attention is what they want. Styles that truly are hard to read, like Fraktur, are seen only in faux medieval text, like on wedding invitations.
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 :)
Problem is, Times Roman looks crap on computer screens. 76dpi simply doesn't work.
No sig today...
I live in Canberra Australia where billboards are not allowed. I've been here for 15 years and now when I leave town and go to say, Sydney, the billboards drive me crazy. They're such a blot on the landscape. Plus now it seems that every second one is trying to give me a boner. Not by showing me beautiful women but chemically!
Why ? For sake of tradition and because all other papers are doing it.
I find serif typefaces other than on Roman monuments and for headlines fuzzy and distracting. So I read online where sans-serif prevails.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Do the have the wisdom of all fonts?
It's true though. The R'lyeh Plus Dread font on my Wal-Mart Lower Prices import car drips green goo through impossible angles. VERY distracting while driving!
... the problem is that one has to look away from the road to see the screen.
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.
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
Wasn't New Century Schoolbook demonstrated to be noticeably easier to read in large scale tests? ALl the subtle things, the serifs, the a-spacing and c-spacing. I could have sworn I saw a study on that from like the 70s.
The problem is, the easier to read NCS font is ugly to look at. There are intermediate options, but sans-serifed fonts with simple lines and curves have a better looking style. A car in particular is a difficult blend of style and function.
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?