In questions of perception and behavior, font matters

Photo: Half Futura, half Comic Sans by Nick Douglas (Flickr)

Behold, the power of font to influence perception and change behavior! An article by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz in the February edition of The Psychologist shows that fonts can significantly influence people's assessment about how easy or difficult things are to do.

Take a look at this example:

When Song and Schwarz presented these exercise instructions in Arial, readers guessed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete. When presented the identical instructions in Brush Script MT (which wasn't quite as hard to read as in this technologically-constrained example), they guessed it would take 15.1 minutes. Plus they were more willing to incorporate the Arial-presented exercise into their daily routine. Implication: If we want people to adopt a new behavior, the instructions don't just need to be semantically clear, they also need to be visually easy to read, otherwise the behavior will seem too demanding.

It's all to do with what the authors call "processing fluency." We don't have unlimited brain processing power (just like my home computer, we don't have enough RAM). If something is written well and it's easy to read, people are able to process the information more easily and will feel more at ease with the thing that's being described. If it's too complex, even if it's just the font that's difficult to read, it starts taxing our circuits.

Other experiments show that a font also influences whether people make decisions or not. Researchers tested people on their ability to choose between two cordless phones. 17% of people tested postponed choice when the font was easy to read, 41% postponed their choice when the font was difficult to read. For more than twice as many people, the difficult-to-read font was enough to stop them taking a decision.

Another interesting finding from this experiment was that, if the participants were told that the information about the phones might be difficult to read because of the print font, the difference between the two groups was completely eliminated. People are apparently quite sensitive to their feelings of ease or difficulty but not so good at figuring out what's driving these feelings. Fonts have subliminal power!

Does this mean that the only good font is a simple font? Not necessarily. Song and Schwarz talk about another of their experiments where they tested people's reaction to a Japanese recipe, once again using an easy-to-read font (Arial) vs. a difficult one (Mistral). In this case, the participants assumed that the difficult-to-read recipe would require more time and skill to prepare than the easy-to-read recipe. That might deter someone from trying out the recipe at home but it also might make them pay more for it at a restaurant.

These experiments are a useful reminder that fonts have functional as well as aesthetic value-- something to bear in mind if tempted by fonts exotic but impenetrable.

(Thanks to the pointer from Mind Hacks)

The ugliest laptop in the world?

Photo: My new Lenovo ThinkPad T500

I don't want anyone to think that I'm not grateful because I am. I really needed a new work laptop. The old one was giving up its will to live, struggling with simple chores and getting slower by the day. It's great to have a laptop that shows some energy and enthusiasm for the task in hand.

But, boy, is this one ugly (and heavy) piece of machinery. It’s aggressively ugly. Not one attractive feature. While colleagues delight in their ever-thinner and more elegant Macs, I’m happy to take a more industrial path. But do you have to make it this drab?

A brand is not a logo (Part 2)

Only last week I posted about how the Mongols, a motorcycle gang from Los Angeles, was prepared to fight both the Hells Angels and the even more fearsome U.S. Attorney's office for the right to wear their signature patch. People have died over this.

So, although I agree with Seth Godin and Oliver Blanchard when they repeat the mantra that "a brand is not a logo," I can't leap with them to the conclusion that logo design has little to no value. Seth says: "Smart marketers understand that a new logo can't possibly increase your market share." Can't possibly?

There are a couple of reasons that logo redesign makes more sense for Pepsi than the average brand. The first is its packaging is everywhere and people see it all the time. Pepsi talks to consumers through this medium. The second is that Pepsi positions itself against Coke as being more contemporary, more dynamic, more what they once described as the "choice of a new generation." Updating, renovating and changing things helps them show that they are staying one step ahead.

Whether the new logo succeeds or not is a different question. Here's the before and after:
(via brandXpress)