Let’s talk about fonts. No please, come back because what we have for you today is really rather interesting especially if you’re in the business of development or user experience design.
The web is rather standardised. By that we mean that things are made to look similar for everybody. While access points and display sizes differ, somethings remain the same such as fonts but perhaps that needs to change.
We say this after reading a study that is found in the ACM Journal, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction for August, which contains a paper that explores how fonts affect reading speed.
The researchers come from Brown University, Cambridge, Adobe, and the University of Central Florida.
The researcher analysed 16 common fonts to determine whether users have a preference or even if there is one font that helps more people read better.
The fonts were separated into four categories outlined below:
PDF – Four most common fonts for digital documents
- Times
- EB Garamond
- Calibri
- Arial
Newsprint – Four most popular fonts from newspapers and print media
- Franklin Gothic
- Utopia
- Helvetica
- Poynter Gothic
Web – Four most popular fonts on the web
- Oswald
- Lato
- Roboto
- Open Sans
Readability – Four fonts selected by readability experts
- Avenir Next
- Noto Sans
- Avant Garde
- Montserrat
We highly recommend reading the full study here as it outlines how it was carried and how certain variables are accounted for.
Fast forwarding however, the research did find that while EB Garamond and Montserrat helped increase the reading speed for readers older than 35, this should not be taken as a standard recommendation for the general populous.
What the research found is that when an individual is reading something in a font they are comfortable with they read much faster. That means the answer to the question “is there is a best font?” is the rather complicated, yes, but it varies from person to person.
This is to be expected because comfort with a font really just comes down to personal preference as anybody who has encountered an Android user with Comic Sans set as their system font can attest to.
“Our pattern of findings highlights an opportunity to augment reading speed for individual adult readers through different font choices. In comparison to participants’ average reading speed, the average reader in our study could add 38 words a minute by changing their font. This increase is equivalent to an additional four to five pages an hour given 500-words per page,” write the researchers.
This could lead to readers having 30 seconds more time when reading something in a font they prefer. This could be leveraged by the likes of Meta, Google and other big tech firms but it requires taking advantage of this research and that would mean giving users the option to customise fonts to their liking. Even this is fraught with issues as the researchers encountered while trying to normalise the various fonts it used in some form of standardisation.
That’s not even mentioning the fact that different fonts could break web page formatting entirely. This research then is not something that can be actioned right now but it should be used to help fuel further research in this area.
However, the researchers are careful to outline that more work and collaboration is needed in this area in order to determine the best course of action.
“While there is clear potential for improvement, understanding how to help each individual in various reading contexts and tasks are unsolved, requiring new collaborations and tools to solve. The potential impacts on individual reading efficacy highlighted here point to a future where machines can help readers attain their full reading potential. We hope the present reader and the multidisciplinary communities will continue to perform this work. Let us engineer better reading for everyone,” the research concludes.
We would love a future where we get to select the font we see on a web page or document and hopefully this sort of research gets that ball rolling.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
