This is the Kind of Stuff I Was Interested in ...
January 6, 2005
9:39 a.m., MT
Back in my grad school days, I had to slog through a lot of really useless research that was considered "important". My area of study was human perceiving and remembering, and so much of the research was very low-level -- by that I mean it relied on tachistoscopic or computer-driven presentations of often complex material, ranging from just a few milliseconds to however long it took the participants to give a response. To me, far too much of the research seemed overly reductionistic; I mean, how can an experiment really claim to be relevant to understanding how we read, for example, when the materials and/or presentation methods are nowhere close to anything that we encounter while actually reading? That kind of research is just one of the many reasons I'm not in academia any longer.

However, my mentor in grad school also had a low tolerance for that kind of make-work (and far too often, "make-career") research. He had wide-ranging and always practically-grounded interests, and rather than constraining those who worked with him (alas, he was not my adviser), he encouraged them to follow their own interests. Text readability was one of his passions while I was in training, and I caught it too. Still have it, in fact ... which you may have difficulty believing, given the somewhat cluttered structure and rough execution of my blog design. (I'm going to change both of those things, though. Patience, please! )

Anyway, that passion is why I'm coming at you relatively late this morning ... I came across an interesting, fairly elegant experiment that attempted to answer some basic questions about text readability for web documents. If you're interested in such matters, you may find it helpful too ... the report is So, What Size and Type of Font Should I Use on My Website? and was conducted at Wichita State University. If you don't want all the technical details, just scroll down to the "conclusion" section. It'll give you the overall interpretation of their results, and identifies what I consider the most serious limitation of their work (and also why I don't use the fonts they studied).

And, if you're interested in delving deeper (I'd love to, but don't have the time right now) into web-use research, check out the GVU Center's WWW surveys. Alas, it appears that the project is no longer active -- the link to the "new and revitalized survey" is 404, and my quick-and-dirty search for a valid link proved futile.

Sunni