Kill Arial or Why your website should be hard to read
The harder a document is to read due to the fonts being used, the better people can learn it according to this study by Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka B. Vaughan
The simple font tested was Arial; the complicated ones were Comic Sans Italic, Monotype Corsiva, and Haettenschweiler.
Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting.
Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.
So your website should be hard to read by using “disfluent fonts” in order to be remembered long as it requires ‘deeper processing’ and thus a better recall?
a) If you use a easy readable type face then people scan it quickly and they think understand it:
- They might forget it almost as fast due to fast processing
- The have gotten the wrong message due to the scanning: missing the point
b) If you use a difficult to read type face it will take longer to decipher it and read it – requiring reading every word and imposing more time to your brain to understand it
As the study was done on students the average website visitors might not have the same reaction: if your font is hardly readable at all people will probably just use the back button and look down on in the search results page for another link.
Note: you should remember the Italics better. Not ?
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