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MIT Researchers Show Dash Font Choice Affects Distraction

Posted by Unknown on from the grotesque-fonts-lead-to-grotesque-crashes dept.

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.

33 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Just don't text/SMS! by fantomas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Just don't text/SMS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I am blind for most font differences. I can not even see difference between hyped "MS core" fonts and "ugly KDE" fonts.

      Only time when I can see difference is when I swap them rapily in LibreOffice or when I change konsole to use bitmap font without smoothing as by default it use smoothed fonts.

      It is just ironic that I do lots of graphical arts for my profession, but when it comes to fonts, I am totally blind to see the "huge difference". Thats why I always ask someone else to pick fonts for me.

    2. Re:Just don't text/SMS! by Dupple · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well it wouldn't matter if you weren't texting while doing 70 on the highway! :-)

      I'm doing 70 and commenting on /. you insensitive clod!

      --
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    3. Re:Just don't text/SMS! by pod · · Score: 2

      Stop trying to explicitely criminalize individual behaviours. Doesn't work. Distracted driving is distracted driving. How is texting different from arguing with your passenger or yelling at your kids in the back, or any number of other things people regularly do that do not involve cell phones or texting? All are equally dangerous to texting, and perfectly legal. But being caught with a cell phone stuck to your ear is pretty obvious. Much harder to catch "distracted driving". It's all about politicians being seen "doing something about it". Causing an accident while texting is punitively punished, but causing an accident because your girlfriend was giving you shit is just something unfortunate that could have happened to anyone.

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    4. Re:Just don't text/SMS! by cellocgw · · Score: 2

      Causing an accident while texting is punitively punished, but causing an accident because your girlfriend was giving you shit^H^H^H^H head is just something unfortunate that could have happened to anyone

      FTFY

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    5. Re:Just don't text/SMS! by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Stop trying to explicitely criminalize individual behaviours. Doesn't work. Distracted driving is distracted driving. How is texting different from arguing with your passenger or yelling at your kids in the back, or any number of other things people regularly do that do not involve cell phones or texting? All are equally dangerous to texting, and perfectly legal. But being caught with a cell phone stuck to your ear is pretty obvious. Much harder to catch "distracted driving". It's all about politicians being seen "doing something about it". Causing an accident while texting is punitively punished, but causing an accident because your girlfriend was giving you shit is just something unfortunate that could have happened to anyone.

      A cellphone is, unfortunately, more distracting than the same person beside you. First, if they're beside you, they're in the same position you're in, and can adapt their conversation to suit the situation. Second, there's less human inhibition to just ask for quiet for a moment while you execute a tricky driving maneuver.

      For example, let's say you're talking to your boss on your phone. You're far less likely to ask him to shut up, ask him to repeat or make him pause as you try to change lanes or merge onto the freeway, and he's not in the car so he can't pause to let you execute these tasks without you saying so. But if he was in the car, he could see you're trying to merge or change lanes and pause appropriately, as well as repeat what he was saying before. Or if he spots some idiot who cut you off way too close, or sees you're struggling with holding both the impromptu meeting and driving, postpone the conversation until later.

      There are some considerate people who realize the person on the other end is driving and ask if it's a good time or if they should call back later, but most assume that they have your full attention (and get seriously annoyed if you ask them to repeat - forcing you to concentrate on the conversation even while executing more complex maneuvers). Hell, they can get offended if you politely remind them you're driving and would they please call back later.

      Even the radio isn't as distracting - turn on some talk radio, put on an audiobook, and you'll find drivers tune it out when necessary. If you ask them what they heard, most will admit to not listening because they were concentrating.

      If you really want proof - observe traffic sometime - you'll find those idiot drivers who slow down and drive erratically these days are on the phone - yapping away or texting, while being completely oblivious to traffic. Most aren't aware they do it either, but the fact it happens shows that they're slowing down as they can't process the road as fast and are doing so to be safer. Erratic driving the same - they're so engrossed with texting or their conversation that they don't realize traffic is moving or slowing down or even aware of lane boundaries.

  2. So what we're saying is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.......

    1. Re:So what we're saying is... by digitig · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I thought that was a matter of screen resolution. At the resolutions commonly available when most studies were done, serifs would have been hard to render accurately and consistently. Heck, even on the screen and size I am using to type this, if I switch to Times New Roman the anti-aliasing struggles with the serifs on 's' and 'n' with the result that they look blurry.

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    2. Re:So what we're saying is... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Serif fonts are easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words.

      Actually, that's an old theory that has been solidly debunked on both counts at this point.

      For a start, based on experimental research, we know that people don't actually move their eyes continuously across the text as we read. Instead, our eyes make short jumps called saccades, fixating on one point on the line and then another a few characters further along. That immediately makes any argument based on serifs "guiding" anything suspect.

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    3. Re:So what we're saying is... by BetterSense · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I tried to read you post, but all I got was *fap fap*saccades*fap fap*

      Our eyes may use saccades at the hardware level, but we compose images with our brains' DSP (ASP?). The fact that the eyes jump around is interesting but means approximately nothing.

      I think it's safe to say that nobody sees the world in jerky motion from eyeballs moving jerkily. For that matter, the high-resolution fovea in the human eye only subtends a few degrees of arc, but you just never notice, because the brain has heavy-duty processing power that synthesizes a high-resolution picture of the world through image-stitching. You can only focus at once distance at a time, but we don't really notice that either. We have stereo vision which means that we see double-images of things, but we don't really notice any double-images. We can see our noses 24 hours a day, but don't notice that either. If you want to try a fun experiment, go into an absolutely dark room, stare straight ahead, and fire a camera flash. Do not move your eyes. You will see a bright, very realistic image of the entire room for many seconds if you can avoid moving (saccading?) your eyes. You see the perfectly bright room, even in the absolute dark, because if you don't move your eyes, it's probably still accurate. As soon as you move your eyes, though, the image disappears, as your brain flushes it like cache data that can no longer be trusted. Sort of a visual cortex version of copy-on-write.

      Typeface design is visual art. Visual artists have known for hundreds of years that certain shapes are pleasing, and how certain lines can draw your attention to certain features of an image, and how certain colors can influence mood. I'm sure it's all completely bunk though, after all, I read on Slasdot about saccades, so now I can dismiss another huge swath of scary subjective human experience and fence it safely out of the lonely introverted enclave that is my nerd existence.

    4. Re:So what we're saying is... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Perhaps you didn't notice the link I posted to Alex Poole's site, where one of the first paragraphs says "In 2003 as part of my master’s degree I reviewed over 50 empirical studies in typography and found a definitive answer" [emphasis added]? It then goes on to describe that work in a lot more detail, complete with numerous citations. I've read some of Alex's work, and I've read quite a few of the other pieces of works he cites. You obviously haven't, but hey, if you prefer to trust in "another huge swath of scary subjective human experience" rather than empirical data collected across a broad set of scientific experiments, knock yourself out.

      However, I suggest that you would be more convincing to others if, instead of attempting exactly the kind of unsourced pseudo-science you seem to be accusing me of and then throwing in a strawman or two at the end, you actually bothered to read the work I pointed to before. We don't have to guess at how these effects work or appeal to old wives' tales from the 1800s. We have detailed, properly conducted experiments using techniques like eye tracking and even updating text on a screen as fast as someone is actually reading it to determine what we really do see and how much our brain is filling in for us. Here's another page that describes some more experiments on related topics, which provide further examples of how the people researching this field reach the kinds of conclusions they do.

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    5. Re:So what we're saying is... by kenorland · · Score: 2

      He had the right idea, though. From Wikipedia:

      The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiseled into stone

      Note that neither theory is about readability.

  3. How does this affect web design ? by Alain+Williams · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:How does this affect web design ? by Rainer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So what font should you choose on your web site ?

      Your user's preferred font in their preferred size and with their preferred colors.

  4. Just use Comic Sans by CodeheadUK · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone loves Comic Sans.

    Then all drivers will be happy, smiley and give way to old ladies.

    1. Re:Just use Comic Sans by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Comic Sans is for schools and community newsletters. Pro desktop publishers and graphics designers use Papyrus

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  5. I feel lied to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did anybody else think this post was going to be about hyphens?

  6. Re:Nice find but.... by Belial6 · · Score: 2

    When it comes to driving, the sooner humans are not doing it the better. There will always be distractions. Even the lack of external distractions just creates internal ones.

  7. I'm blind by TheInternetGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm blind you insensitive clods, the typeface in all cars should be braille and nothing else.

    --
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  8. Not "Grotresque", but "Square Grotesque" by pieleric · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  9. Nothing to do with (sans)serif by A+Friendly+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. I think the lesson here is by mozumder · · Score: 2

    Eurostile is a pretty terrible font.

    1. Re:I think the lesson here is by Dogtanian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Eurostile is a pretty terrible font

      Nothing wrong with Eurostile for what it is, just that in this case (where *any* tradeoff between legibility and style- however minor- might have an effect), it's probably not the best choice.

      In fact, I'd say the fact that it's still "functional-looking" enough is how you could imagine car manufacturers using it in a dashboard whereas (e.g.) a black letter, or cursive/joined-up "handwriting" font would be much worse, but obviously so (and hence not likely to be chosen and hence not an issue here).

      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

      This is true but incomplete; the study used Eurostile (apparently a Square Grotesque font), which is clearly less legible and a stronger example of those claimed issues than Helvetica. Helvetica is still a "Grotesque" type font).

      I'm not saying that Helvetica is the perfect choice, or as good as a Humanist font, just that I suspect it doesn't suffer from this problem to anything like the same extent as Eurostile.

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  11. You have to space them out a bit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Gotta get that kerning right.

    Oh boy, I probably just killed Wednesday for a lot of people. Gooooodbye productivity! And website likely.

  12. Re:Old news by Kenoli · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:Old news by 1u3hr · · Score: 2

    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.

  14. Funny story... by JimmyVolatile · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

    1. Re:Funny story... by JimmyVolatile · · Score: 2

      Errata: The redesigned Myriad-based licence plates were finally made mandatory in Nov 2006 after a 2.5-year delay. All vehicles bought or re-licenced after this date are issued with the new design. http://www.typografi.org/bilskilt/dk54019_myr.jpg . Casually looking out at the nearest 15-space parking lot 6 years later shows a ~80% adoption rate of the new style licence plate :). 2002-style plate is on remaining 2 of the cars and pre-2002 style on 1 car.

  15. Re:Missing control group. by Thong · · Score: 2

    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!

  16. Re:Nice find but.... by clickety6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Too true, What bugs me these days is how many TV documentaries feature interviews with people who are driving cars. Stop talking to them and let them concentrate on driving. If you want to interview them, hire a bloody studio and sit them on a couch to do it - not while they're trying to guide 2 tonnes of metal through a busy intersection in town at 30 miles per hour!

    --
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  17. The problem isn't the font... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

    ... the problem is that one has to look away from the road to see the screen.

  18. Poor auto interfaces continue by DavidHumus · · Score: 2

    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.

  19. Re:Remember ICONS by digitig · · Score: 2

    Yes, my TomTom does that, as does my wife's NavMan. And they both very often get the local speed limit wrong, for a number of reasons -- dynamic speed limits, temporary speed limits, speed limits dependent on weather conditions (common in France), insufficient precision to determine which of 2 roads we are on (especially when the roads are stacked vertically, such as the A4/M4 in West London). GPS is a good way of determining one's speed (when one has a signal), but it's a crock at comparing that to the speed limit. Looking out of the window at roadsigns is always going to be better than a satnav devices database.

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