ClearType improves the efficiency of typical office tasks
In two earlier posts I talked about studies that showed that word recognition is 17% more accurate and sentence comprehension is 5% faster with ClearType. Given these findings we should certainly expect that that there are reading benefits for ClearType when reading extended text. But what about other common office tasks that involve reading, but are more complicated than just straight-forward reading? Andrew Dillon and his colleagues at the University of Texas’ School of Information investigated both of these questions.
Participants in the extended duration reading study read five screens full of 12 point Arial text rendered with ClearType and five screens with 12 point Arial black & white rendered text. All of the expected controls were used so, for instance, half the participants saw a particular article rendered with ClearType, and the other half saw the same article rendered in black & white.
As expected from the earlier findings, people were reliably faster with ClearType without any differences in accuracy of visual fatigue. Participants read for 9 minutes and 9 seconds on average with ClearType, and 9 minutes and 39 seconds with black & white rendering, a reading speed advantage of about 5%. The reading speed for each of the five screens of text was also faster with ClearType.
More interesting was the participants’ performance on a spreadsheet scanning task. In the spreadsheet scanning task participants were asked to perform a task that involved more navigation around the spreadsheet than would typically occur while reading a regular page of text. In the below example, participants were asked how many books are acceptable for an age 4-7 reading level and cost $21. To answer this question, participants need to look at each row of text and count how many rows meet both conditions.
Dillon and colleagues found that people performed the tasks reliably faster when the spreadsheet was rendered in ClearType without any differences in accuracy or visual fatigue. Participants took on average 4 minutes and 40 seconds to complete tasks with ClearType compared to 5 minutes and 4 seconds with black & white rendering, a difference of about 8%.
ClearType not only improves reading speed for traditional page reading, but also improves the efficiency for completing any task that involves recognizing words or numbers.
Kevin Larson
Comments
Anonymous
July 23, 2008
ClearType is very, very good. As is Consolas etc.Anonymous
August 01, 2008
I'd like to mention that probably the shell team in Vista forgot to add some special menu items which the Font folder has in Vista's Explorer. I can't locate "Hide variations (Bold, Italic etc)" command in Vista's Font folder which was very useful in counting the actual number of fonts and quickly previewing them. The preview pane is a lot useful for the fonts folder but now in Vista, you have to skip every 2 files (Bold, Italic), when previewing fonts. Also, view fonts by similarity seems to have disappeared by itself. Hopefully, this'll be fixed in Windows 7.Anonymous
November 19, 2008
I would like to share with us a recent finding: http://www.neo2.es/blog/category/typography/ is a spanish magazine who give for free a lot of experimental types Enjoy!! Stephan ps: ones you choice the font you have to click ACEPTAR and them you can download for mac o pcAnonymous
July 11, 2010
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 17, 2010
The comment has been removedAnonymous
April 09, 2013
It's quite ironic to be reading this post with ClearType forced to be off in the newest MS browser on the newest MS OS.