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.

Comments

Just don't text/SMS!

[fantomas]

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.

So what we're saying is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.......

Re:So what we're saying is...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:So what we're saying is...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Just use Comic Sans

[CodeheadUK]

Everyone loves Comic Sans.

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

Re:Just use Comic Sans

[L4t3r4lu5]

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

I feel lied to

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Nothing to do with (sans)serif

[A Friendly Troll]

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.

Funny story...

[JimmyVolatile]

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 :)

Re:Nice find but....

[clickety6]

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!