Science That Matters

The Microsoft Typography group (one of the few good groups at Microsoft, it seems) gave subjects two versions of a piece of text, one with careful typography, one with crummy stuff. Which version they had didn’t matter for reading speed or comprehension and subjects didn’t even tend to prefer one. But when you looked at measures of happiness — like activation of the smiling muscles or better performance on simple tasks — the half that got the good typography were much happier.

• A description of the study (from UIScape, a sort of Science That Matters for CHI research)
• The Aesthetics of Reading [PDF paper]
• Proceedings containing the full paper

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