It's called graceful degradation: figure out what parts of the user experience are so important they have to work even without JS enabled, and make sure they do. They clearly knew what their priorities were.
Did this too. That eye is doing a disservice to that site - if wasn't a web developer who knows how to remove that, I would not have finished reading the article and left that page. Annoying things chase people away, guarantee that site gets less return visitors because of it.
The article here is interesting, approachable and good. Of course, your links add to it, it's the source mentioned in the first paragraph. But we can still read interesting secondary sources.
It doesn't add anything significant that's not in the original article. Worse, unlike most blogspam, it doesn't even directly link to the original article.
All right. Though I thought the mention was pretty explicit, and a good summary of the research there. I also thought it's a super-quick read, and I learned something.
I did an experiment like this in the mid-90s as an undergraduate for a research methods lab assignment.
I showed true and made-up (NPR Wait Wait style) articles to elderly people (over 70, in a care home), printed in one of 3 formats - on newsprint in the font the NY Times uses, on glossy paper in a somewhat 'friendly' font (like comic sans, but less so), and finally in dot matrix, on green-and-white fanfold, all upper case.
There were remarkably few differences in the first two, for either true or false stories, but NEARLY EVERYONE (like, > 85%) rated the computer fanfold printed stories as being true.
One person's reaction has stuck with me to this day: "If it weren't true, the computer would have rejected it!"
Maybe his thought process was that giving the age twice ("elderly" and then "70" -- do you need both?) would be redundant, so that the redundant number might not be an age.
Indeed. I also consider 70 to be pretty young for a retirement home. Statistically speaking, I assume the vast majority of 70 year olds (95+%) are living independently. So I thought either OP is being redundant and low-balling or giving a sample size. Didn't know.
Btw, through a quick web-search, it appears the average for new residents is mid-80s.
The customer account statements for Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities were notoriously old fashioned computer printouts. [1][2] There was some coverage with a former client, I can't find now, where he even talked about the appearance of the statements encouraging trust.
I wonder if Bernie Madoff researched it, or if it just came with a con man's intuition.
Rather than any intrinsic property of the font, I'd ascribe it to the associations we have to it. Has previous things we read in this font been trustworthy?
Are there cross-cultural studies of this effect? If you are wrong, trustworthy fonts will have the same set of properties in cultures with similar alphabets. Pair of cultures which rate trustworthiness of fonts differently despite sharing the same language and alphabet could prove you.
I believe there is too much homogeneity among cultures using the same fonts (i.e. latin alphabet) that there isn't going to be such a case.
For example, hand-writing-like fonts are used in comics both in US style, european and south american stuff; newspapers and books have been printed with serif fonts since about forever; international brands look the same; MS Office/windows has provide everyone with the same fonts for decades.
I think the takeaway from this is that people associate "odd" fonts with different things (but rarely professionalism), which makes them scary to use in a professional context. Similar to how most of us are "afraid" of wasps because we've had previous bad experiences with them, most people have experienced out of the normal fonts in the wild, but most often in a joke, or on a bad internet site. This previous experience, like the wasp, is taken with us subliminally to the next time we see the font.
Standard fonts exist because if you use them everywhere, users are forced to evaluate the content, and not the font.
Speaking of bad experiences though, I tend to avoid Betteridge's[0] too.
Presumably we believe people wouldn't invest time and energy going to great lengths to present something that isn't true in a well-designed and complex way. Which is stupid really, because the effort someone will put in is almost always related to the reward they get out rather than anything to do with truth - if presenting something false has a high return people will go to great lengths to present it extremely well.
“It’s absurd to think that we would be nudged by one typeface over another, into believing something to be true. Something disturbing about it, I’d go so far to say.”
It's really not disturbing.
It's obvious that the way something is presented can affect your judgement about things like the motives (or credibility or even identity) of the person saying it, and it's obvious that this will in turn affect whether you believe what you're being told. Things like tone of voice, choice of words, and typeface all have an effect.
Why does it surprise people that the manner in which you communicate can affect how likely people are to believe what you're saying?
Now, Morris is the first to admit that this wasn’t exactly a true scientific experiment, but you know what? That’s okay! Because the findings are still fascinating.
Experiment validity and the interestingness of the results are orthogonal. Considering the topic, I'd hypothesize that the less valid the experiment is, the more the experimenter is motivated to make the results look interesting.
It's not surprising, but it is disturbing. Because this result holds independent of the content being communicated. A good presentation doesn't just affect your evaluation of opinions, ethical arguments, or he-said-she-said judgements. It affects your evaluation of proofs, engineering decisions, and concrete physical evidence. Decisions that are formal enough, in the mathematical sense of the word, that we should be relegating them to computers if at all possible. That's disturbing.
What if... this whole article is an experiment in itself in that it is completely false, but has used its fonts and the blinking eye to convince us otherwise.
I was just thinking somewhat the same thing, making my son familiar with mono-spaced fonts, so when he found some source code, it'll be like home to him when he grows up...
That's really neat that you want your son to be familiar with monospaced fonts so source code displayed that way will look normal and comfortable. Screenplays too!
So I hope I won't be out of line with a friendly suggestion... :-)
Don't teach him that there is something special about monospaced fonts that lets you write code - that code can only be written in a monospaced font. I honestly think that the majority of programmers believe this, but it just isn't so.
I haven't written any of my code in a monospaced font in over ten years - and the funny thing is you'd never be able to tell that from reading my code. It reads the same and the formatting looks the same whether you view it in a proportional or monospaced font.
I've run into many programmers who are shocked when they find out that I write code in a proportional font. They ask, "How can you do that? How can it possibly work?"
Rather than go into the details here of how it can possibly work - it's really quite simple and becomes apparent once you try a proportional font - imagine that one day your son asks, "Daddy, why do we have to code in monospaced fonts? I like Trebuchet! [Or Comic Sans, or whatever.] Why can't I code in that?"
Do you answer, "Don't be silly, of course you can't do that. We always program in monospaced fonts. You couldn't possibly code in a proportional font, it just doesn't work."
Or, "Well, that's a good question. I've always used monospaced fonts, but I never really thought about it. Why don't you experiment and see how it works out, maybe you can teach me something new!"
Don't misunderstand, these are just examples, I don't mean to put words in your mouth or say what kind of conversation you and your son might have. But I think most programmers today would give the first answer, and that makes me a bit sad.
Whatever your own thoughts about fonts, it is definitely cool that you want to open the doors for your son to be interested in programming!
It would be fascinating if they could release the anonymized raw data though. I'm curious about the vague statement "people are much more likely to believe something written in Baskerville than any of the other fonts." For example, I want to know the sample size and the significance level at which the conclusion is obtained.
More than 20 years ago, at the company where I was working, I needed to order some sort of expensive thing. Printing a purchase order on the dot matrix printer connected to our accounting computer was a hassle, so I duplicated the form in whatever word processing program we were using on the Apple Mac. It even said Purchase Order at the top.
I faxed it to the vendor, and received a reply: "We will ship the item when we receive a copy of the actual purchase order."
I did nothing but re-print the order in Courier font, and faxed it to them. It was just the ticket. The boss said, "Now you know why we keep that old dot matrix printer on the accounting computer."
This is new -- a blog where you can't read below the fold by any known method. Arrow keys? Nope. PageDn? Nope. Scroll wheel? Nope. Scroll bar? Disabled.
69 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] threadPart 2: http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2012/08/09/hear-...
This word really isn't appropriate. (Similar to my thoughts here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9572254 ).
The article here is interesting, approachable and good. Of course, your links add to it, it's the source mentioned in the first paragraph. But we can still read interesting secondary sources.
I showed true and made-up (NPR Wait Wait style) articles to elderly people (over 70, in a care home), printed in one of 3 formats - on newsprint in the font the NY Times uses, on glossy paper in a somewhat 'friendly' font (like comic sans, but less so), and finally in dot matrix, on green-and-white fanfold, all upper case.
There were remarkably few differences in the first two, for either true or false stories, but NEARLY EVERYONE (like, > 85%) rated the computer fanfold printed stories as being true.
One person's reaction has stuck with me to this day: "If it weren't true, the computer would have rejected it!"
Btw, through a quick web-search, it appears the average for new residents is mid-80s.
Must have been a Prolog programmer!
I wonder if Bernie Madoff researched it, or if it just came with a con man's intuition.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/madoff/financial/
[2] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/a-look-at-madoffs-tra...
For example, hand-writing-like fonts are used in comics both in US style, european and south american stuff; newspapers and books have been printed with serif fonts since about forever; international brands look the same; MS Office/windows has provide everyone with the same fonts for decades.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-com...
I suppose the context kept the font choice from detracting too much in that case!
Standard fonts exist because if you use them everywhere, users are forced to evaluate the content, and not the font.
Speaking of bad experiences though, I tend to avoid Betteridge's[0] too.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
It's really not disturbing.
It's obvious that the way something is presented can affect your judgement about things like the motives (or credibility or even identity) of the person saying it, and it's obvious that this will in turn affect whether you believe what you're being told. Things like tone of voice, choice of words, and typeface all have an effect.
Why does it surprise people that the manner in which you communicate can affect how likely people are to believe what you're saying?
Now, Morris is the first to admit that this wasn’t exactly a true scientific experiment, but you know what? That’s okay! Because the findings are still fascinating.
Experiment validity and the interestingness of the results are orthogonal. Considering the topic, I'd hypothesize that the less valid the experiment is, the more the experimenter is motivated to make the results look interesting.
I'm heavily biased toward anything published as Latex PhD template instance.
[1] https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_xkcd_style_graph... [2] http://dan.iel.fm/xkcd/
guess it's going to work, to some extent
p/s: he's just 4yo now
So I hope I won't be out of line with a friendly suggestion... :-)
Don't teach him that there is something special about monospaced fonts that lets you write code - that code can only be written in a monospaced font. I honestly think that the majority of programmers believe this, but it just isn't so.
I haven't written any of my code in a monospaced font in over ten years - and the funny thing is you'd never be able to tell that from reading my code. It reads the same and the formatting looks the same whether you view it in a proportional or monospaced font.
I've run into many programmers who are shocked when they find out that I write code in a proportional font. They ask, "How can you do that? How can it possibly work?"
Rather than go into the details here of how it can possibly work - it's really quite simple and becomes apparent once you try a proportional font - imagine that one day your son asks, "Daddy, why do we have to code in monospaced fonts? I like Trebuchet! [Or Comic Sans, or whatever.] Why can't I code in that?"
Do you answer, "Don't be silly, of course you can't do that. We always program in monospaced fonts. You couldn't possibly code in a proportional font, it just doesn't work."
Or, "Well, that's a good question. I've always used monospaced fonts, but I never really thought about it. Why don't you experiment and see how it works out, maybe you can teach me something new!"
Don't misunderstand, these are just examples, I don't mean to put words in your mouth or say what kind of conversation you and your son might have. But I think most programmers today would give the first answer, and that makes me a bit sad.
Whatever your own thoughts about fonts, it is definitely cool that you want to open the doors for your son to be interested in programming!
No its not ok because it means that the findings, however fascinating, can't be accepted.
I faxed it to the vendor, and received a reply: "We will ship the item when we receive a copy of the actual purchase order."
I did nothing but re-print the order in Courier font, and faxed it to them. It was just the ticket. The boss said, "Now you know why we keep that old dot matrix printer on the accounting computer."
[Chrome 43, Win7]