Consider the following.  You’re thinking about taking a holiday this year and you want a destination that will be hot enough for lazing by the sea in May.  You have a couple of brochures.  You would base your decision on your own general knowledge of the countries represented in the brochures and your specific requirements for the desired holiday, right?  What you would not do is base your decision on the font in which the information was provided to you.  Surely not.  And yet…

Recent experiments have shown that font influences the fluency with which information is processed.  The amount of effort required to read can inform the choice of the reader.  An experiment similar to the following was run – showing two sets of readers the same text in two different fonts:

When the readers were asked to estimate the time it would take to do this task, most of those presented with the task in the clearer font (in this case Arial) thought it would take almost half the time other group estimated.  I.e. the time and effort taken to read the text influenced the readers’ feelings towards the task itself.

Similar experiments were run regarding more commercial subjects.  Given two product descriptions, again taking two groups and two fonts, readers were able to make decisions about product choice more easily if they could process the text more easily.

In the internet world, we know that a clearer font means a clearer message, but think about the other risks you take if you use “difficult” fonts for stylistic reasons.  You not only muddle your message, you influence the way in which your website visitors understand and view your product, your company, your website processes.  Ease of understanding breeds a sense of familiarity.  In a shop, this could lead to repeat purchases of a product.  Online, this could mean repeat visits.

Here’s another fascinating tid-bit.  In their article, Song and Schwartz refer to a study done in 2006 by Daniel Oppenheimer and Adam Alter which noted that companies with easier to pronounce ticker symbols (like KAR) performed better than companies with difficult to pronounce symbols (like RDO) on the first day of trading!  The thought was that the more pronounceable symbols seemed less risky.

Moving from font into visuals, have a look at the images below.

If you were told that one was a Bouba and one was a Kiki, which one would you think was which?

Most people would decide that the image on the left was a Kiki and that one the right was a Bouba.  This is true across languages and age groups and was first observed by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929.  This leads to the suggestion that object naming is not random, which leads to the thought that combining names with “inappropriate” shapes online could cause a subconscious clash for the website visitor.

The majority of people will answer “two” when presented with the question “How many types of each animal did Moses take on the Ark” despite the fact that they know that the Ark was Noah’s, not Moses’.  Fluency processing and visual cohesion should not be a nice-to-have in website design, but a fundamental part of ensuring that your website is engaging with people.