Here’s a partial cure for distracted driving: Improve the typefaces on cockpit displays. Careful selection of readable display fonts means a driver can scan displays quickly, understand what they say at a glance, make the right selection, and get his eyes back on the road. Research done by by MIT found so-called humanist family fonts easier to read than grotesque family fonts. The humanist letterforms are more open, with increased inter-character spacing, and characters are unambiguous in their forms and proportions. In a series of experiments, men spent 11% less time glancing at a humanist than grotesque display before returning their eyes to the road. At highway speeds, that’s a savings of 50 or so feet. For women, there was a modest difference and as for why they fared differently than men, MIT’s researchers say it falls into the realm of we-just-don’t-know. Federal guidelines suggest drivers should glance at displays for no more than 1.5 seconds (132 feet traveled at 60 mph) and auto industry guidelines suggest no more than 2 seconds, so savings of even a few tenths of a second are important for both auto safety and staying on the good side of the feds.

MIT ran the study for Monotype International, a typeface company that sells — surprise — humanist fonts such as Frutiger (pictured above), which was used in the test. (Monotype actually makes all types of fonts.) In a test of “glance times,” the key finding was that men performing tasks reading and selecting choices from a dashtop portable display, completed the tasks and had their eyes back on the road 10.6% faster when reading Monotype’s Frutiger (humanist) font than reading the Eurostile (a so-called grotesque) font. For women, the improvement in glance time going from grotesque to humanist was only fractionally improved, less than 2%. Both men and women made 3.1% fewer menu selection errors with the humanist font. Monotype also says carefully designed commercial humanist fonts (that you pay for) may be more readable than lookalike fonts freely available online (that you don’t).

If you want to see for yourself, on a PC that has Microsoft Office or Publisher installed, you’re likely to find your PC loaded with Eurostile, the grotesque font used in the MIT study, and Corbel, a humanist font similar to Frutiger. Notice how Eurostile is blocky. At a glance, Eurostile’s C-D-O-0 (capital oh and zero) seem somehat alike. With Corbel here, or Frutiger, the C is more open so it’s not like D, and capital 0 and zero are different sizes and widths. In their study, An Evaluation of Typeface Design in a Text-Rich Automotive User Interface [PDF], three members of MITs AgeLab, Bryan Reimer, Bruce Mehler, and Joseph Coughlin, tested how much better a humanist font might be. (Although the lab’s name suggests old people, subjects were in their 30s to 70s.)

The MIT report says the smaller test differences shown by women from grotesque to humanist were “novel and were unexpected …. this does raise the question as to whether there might be other visual acuity or perceptual differences associated with gender” that led to the results the researchers got. Not surprisingly, the researchers suggested more research is needed.

According to MIT’s Reimer, typographers believe humanist fonts with strongly differentiated form groups (that is, the number 0 doens’t look like a capital O) have an advantage in quick-glance situations such as reading a car’s LCD display than geometric sans-serif faces (such as Century Gothic), grotesque sans-serifs (Arial, Helvetica), and square grotesque sans-serifs (Eurostile). “Grotesque” is a common typographic term that connotes “different” more than “bizarre” or “weird.” The MIT group chose Eurostile as a comparison baseline because it’s already used in some car displays.

Eurostile, as a font face, suggests high technology, the clean lines of modern architecture, or science fiction. You might associate it with the aura of a Droid phone (which actually has its own fonts). “Eurostile is actually very popular in automotive today — it conveys power and energy,” says Steve Matteson, creative type director at Monotype and part of the research team. “However, the letterforms are mechanically rigid and compact, tightly spaced, and in some cases are nearly indistinguishable from each other.”

According to Monotype, “Humanist typefaces such as the Frutiger design … are characterized by open forms that lead the eye horizontally, making them ideal for reading small text. Humanist styles are noted for their highly distinguishable shapes, which help to lessen at-a-glance ambiguity.”

The test was run on a 7-inch LCD display with 800×480 resolution, effectively a largish portable GPS system that might be in a big SUV or truck. The fonts were fixed at 4mm high or about 15 points, says Monotype. The test setting was a stationary Volkswagen New Beetle with a projected road surface in front and a pair of eye-tracking cameras on the dash, perfectly adequate for testing, MIT says, if not quite as impressive as the 360-degrees-of-video Ford Virttex simulator. They timed how long the driver spent performing tasks (picking an address, a restaurant name, and content from lists), how quickly they got their eyes back on the road, and how many errors they made. Men were noticeably improved working from Frutiger menus, with a reduction in glance time of 12.2% in one study and by 9.1% in a second study with reduced contrast displays (average 10.6%). Men and women made errors 3.1% less often picking from humanist-font lists. While the lack of difference by females on some other tasks surprised the testers, it wasn’t that the women performed worse than men; on some tests they were better.

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