Relating Aesthetics of the GUI Text Elements with Readability using Font Family

Abstract

Although, a number of works were reported on the readability of the text elements present in digital as well as the printed media, aesthetics of the text elements were ignored till date. In this work, the effect font family on text aesthetics, and readability is reported. Forty text based interfaces were designed by using different fonts; half of them were serif fonts, and the rest were sans-serif fonts. The interfaces were rated based on the aesthetic appeal on a five-point rating scale by a group of forty participants. The reading times were recorded to identify the effect of readability with the font families. Based on the empirical data, two one-dimensional ANOVA were carried out on the aesthetics, and readability respectively. Experimental results showed that font family is a statistically significant feature for both the readability and aesthetics. In order to establish the relation of the readability with aesthetics, the average users' rating and average reading time were considered as the final ratings for all the forty interfaces. It was observed that the texts with better aesthetics generally improves the readability.