If you're not reading the Wichita State Software Usability Research Laboratory newsletter regularly, you should be. It's an amazing source of usability experiments with actual data, hypotheses, citations, statistics, and all that other stuff that puts the science back into computer science.
Is there no feed for this site?
I mean for the Wichita State Software Usability Research Laboratory site.
No way. That’s my alma mater. Go Shockers.
I wonder how much the color of the background influences how easy a font is to read?
Ugh, without anti-aliasing they all look really horrible. I wonder if decent AA would have altered the results at all.
Interesting stuff.
I wonder if they every looked at graph comprehension, specifically the order in which things are presented. That graph isn’t ordered any way that I can see, but it would be so much easier to work out if it was ranked by time. I note the cheaty way the bulk of the graph is left off, which magnifies the apparent differences between results.
In terms of font choices, what would be more useful is to include comprehension for english text, and use a “find the trivial bug” in code. I suspect that would show up the difference between monospaced and proprotional fonts really fast. I suggest debugging because that’s mostly what programmers do, so it’s the task to test on (it’s also important 
I wonder if they every looked at graph comprehension, specifically the order in which things are presented.
Good point. It’s not in score order, nor is it in font name order.
Always avoid RANDOM order. Geez.
Another issue with the graph: no units. I had to visit the link and read the caption of the graph to find out what units it was in. It may have been obvious to others, but I’d rather not have to do any assuming.
It is interresting to note that Microsoft declared Tahoma to be the font of choice since Windows 2000. I wonder if they came to this conclusion through usability surveys of their own.
The fonts are listed in alphabetical order grouped by family. If you look at the list in the article, you can see the order reading from left to right in Table 1.
So it’s not completely random, just not labeled well.
Plus, they are listed the same way on every graph. So you don’t have to hunt around to find out where Tahoma is.
It’s hard for me to take advice from Jakob Nielsen, who wrote the article on text block size. His page is just so ugly that I can’t take him seriously. I know he has a reputation as a usability expert, but I don’t care. I guess I’m still a kid–I want what I read to have pretty pictures.
I wonder how much the color of the background influences how easy a font is to read?
For some people it makes a huge difference. I have a friend who reads 3+ times faster with black on blue rather than black on white.
I find Comic Sans MS to be quite a comfortable font to read, how did it end up taking longer than Agency?
I’d love to have a utility that takes proportional fonts and generates monospace fonts from them, so I could use fonts like Tahoma in my development environment.
I have a hard time finding monospace fonts that I actually like because many of them look clunky or have too much whitespace around each letter, especially between lines.
I’ve just gone through a pretty long personal trial of different programming fonts. I’ve been using a really old OEM but very readable font for a long time, but decided to test out some other candidates. For what it’s worth, in the end, I found the new Microsoft Consolas monospaced font to be the best. It’s as readable as my favorite proportianal font Verdana, but fixed pitch so you can use it for development.
found the new Microsoft Consolas monospaced font to be the best
Only if you’re using ClearType, though:
After reading reading about how staleness isn’t a problem in the previous article, in this article the 3rd and 4th links are 404s.
Oh the irony.