How is it that this post uses a sans-serif font? Are some users able to pick a font? No one should have that power. As far as I could tell, the literature seems to say that the only thing about fonts that affects their readability is their familiarity, how much text the reader has previously read in this font.
You can use a serif font as the site default if you really want to, you probably should use a sans-serif font because that’s what people are mostly used to reading in most venues, but if you encourage authors to switch between them you are doing the one thing that could harm readability for long-term users, and it is a mistake.
If you want to leave it to individual preference, let the user choose which font they see, don’t make the author of each article choose for them.
>To gain some statistical & web development experience and to improve my readers’ experiences, I have been running a series of CSS A/B tests since June 2012. As expected, most do not show any meaningful difference.
How is it that this post uses a sans-serif font? Are some users able to pick a font? No one should have that power. As far as I could tell, the literature seems to say that the only thing about fonts that affects their readability is their familiarity, how much text the reader has previously read in this font.
You can use a serif font as the site default if you really want to, you probably should use a sans-serif font because that’s what people are mostly used to reading in most venues, but if you encourage authors to switch between them you are doing the one thing that could harm readability for long-term users, and it is a mistake.
If you want to leave it to individual preference, let the user choose which font they see, don’t make the author of each article choose for them.
(edit: worth mentioning some testing gwern did once http://www.gwern.net/AB-testing.
>To gain some statistical & web development experience and to improve my readers’ experiences, I have been running a series of CSS A/B tests since June 2012. As expected, most do not show any meaningful difference.
)