Re: Online fonts and sizes -- new usability study

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

Keith,

You're not understanding the source of my objection. 

The problem isn't that confounding variable were not studied in minute detail. It is that they were ignored altogether, rendering the collected data meaningless.

Let me explain. Here are three hats, all made from the same kind of material, all shaped exactly the same way, using the same tools and techniques, but each in a different color. Line the hats up in some order. Present the line of hats to a few hundred successive viewers and ask each for his or her preference. Which one would you select for yourself? Which one would you select for a red-haired person? Etc. Now change the sequence of the hats and repeat the experiment with a new group of people. Continue in this manner until you have gathered sufficient data to conclude that a particular color is strongly preferred by everyone, or that the preference depends mostly on the person's complexion/hair color, or that the preference depends mostly on the hat's position in the display sequence.

Okay, got the picture?

Fine. Now do the same experiment with three hats that are entirely different in type, size, and material--a beret, a man's fedora, a woman's garden party hat with birds and feathers. Do you see that you will never be able to draw any conclusions from the data?

The same situation obtains in the "study" we're discussing. Because the psychologists doing the work are oblivious to even the most basic understanding of how type works, they make the fatal assumption that all they are changing is the font and they are keeping everything else constant. But they are not keeping everything else constant. First of all, "point size" is meaningless when viewing type on a monitor. Pixel size might have helped, but they didn't use that. Second, changing the font changes the number of characters on a line of a given length. This affects readability. They made no mention of holding characters-per-line steady while they fiddled with fonts. Third, character spacing is affected by the choice of rendering software. Some software respects typographic kerning; other software doesn't. Some is better at rendering letterforms than others. They made no mention that I recall of what software they were using. Acrobat? Netscape browser? IE? Word?

This isn't a matter of typographic niceties; it's a matter of naivete of the researchers leading to false assumptions and consequently to indefensible results.

I still want to see a study where a psychologist actually works collegially with an expert typographer to design a meaningful experiment.

Dick

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