The Incredible Shrinking Letter: How Font Size Affects the Legibility of Text Viewed in Brief Glances

As in-vehicle interfaces have become miniature computers with userfacing LCD screens, the complexities of designing for them have increased tremendously. Given their safety-critical nature, designers must carefully consider every aspect of the vehicle’s digital interface. Recent research has suggested that even the typeface used to display the interface’s text can have significant impacts on driver behaviors such as total off-road glance time and secondary task completion time. Here we outline a psychophysical method for rapidly assessing the glance-based legibility of two different typefaces (a “humanist” and a “square grotesque”) presented in two different sizes (3mm and 4mm). Consistent with previous research, we find that humanist type is more legible than square grotesque. We also find that text is empirically less legible at 3mm compared to 4mm, and that this effect is especially pronounced for the square grotesque typeface. Legibility thresholds were also found to increase linearly with age, more than doubling across the age range studied. We hypothesize that the square grotesque’s intrinsic design characteristics cause it to scale poorly at small sizes and lose important details, especially in suboptimal display conditions

Assessing the impact of typeface design in a text-rich automotive user interface

Text-rich driver–vehicle interfaces are increasingly common in new vehicles, yet the effects of different typeface characteristics on task performance in this brief off-road based glance context remains sparsely examined. Subjects completed menu selection tasks while in a driving simulator. Menu text was set either in a ‘humanist’ or ‘square grotesque’ typeface. Among men, use of the humanist typeface resulted in a 10.6% reduction in total glance time as compared to the square grotesque typeface. Total response time and number of glances showed similar reductions. The impact of typeface was either more modest or not apparent for women. Error rates for both males and females were 3.1% lower for the humanist typeface. This research suggests that optimised typefaces may mitigate some interface demands. Future work will need to assess whether other typeface characteristics can be optimised to further reduce demand, improve legibility, increase usability and help meet new governmental distraction guidelines

Business performance and angels presence: A fresh look from France 2008–2011

Business angels enjoy a strong reputation for being more efficient than other investors among policy makers, practitioners, and scholars. However, due to the limited availability of specific financial data, previous research has barely assessed the impact of angels on companies’ performance. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by providing evidence from a unique dataset made up of 432 angel-backed French companies which are compared to two control groups, one randomly selected and another one consisting of similar enterprises. This double comparison process enables us to purge our analysis of structural effect and to demonstrate the importance of the methodology in generating the sample. Indeed, the results we obtain significantly differ depending on the control group. Our results show that the positive influence of angels depends on the condition of the comparison. The set of BA-backed companies is more likely to exhibit superior performance when it is compared to a random sample whereas the companies’ performance is either identical or worse when it is compared to a sample composed of k-nearest neighbors. In addition, using a quantile regression technique makes it possible to differentiate the effect of business angels based on the distribution of the value of the growth rate. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York

The effects of Chinese typeface design, stroke weight, and contrast polarity on glance based legibility

Modern interfaces increasingly rely on screens filled with digital text to display information to users. Previous research has shown that even relatively subtle differences in the design of the on-screen typeface can influence to-device glance time in a measurable and meaningful way (Reimer et al., 2014). Here we outline a methodology for rapidly and flexibly investigating the legibility of typefaces on digital screens in glance-like contexts, and apply this method to a comparison of 5 Simplified Chinese typefaces. We find that the legibility of the typefaces, measured as the minimum presentation time needed to read character strings accurately and respond to a yes/no lexical decision task, is sensitive to differences in the typeface's design characteristics. The most legible typeface under study ("MT YingHei") could be read 33.1% faster than the least legible typeface in this glance-induced context. A second study examined two different weights of the MT YingHei type family (medium and bold), as well as two contrast polarity (color) conditions to investigate how these variations impact legibility thresholds. Results indicate that bold weight text is easier to read in this enforced glance-like context, and that positive polarity text (black on white) is easier to read compared to white on black text under the lighting conditions considered. These results are discussed in terms of contextual factors that may mediate glance-reading behavior, as well as how type design interacts with the practical limitations of a moderate density pixel grid. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved