Re: Learning more from harder-to-read fonts?

I don't think it's quite as simple as that... Well, nothing ever is on this list. It could be argued that some hospital forms do involve learning of the same kind you might find in a classroom. 

Most of us indeed treat documents like forms as just administrative, but they can come back to bite us... When we sign a consent form in hospital, or a car rental contract, we are deemed to have understood it and cannot later protest. In some cases this means didactic explanations of what questions mean, or what the implications of different answers might be. For example, non-UK citizens working here have to tell the tax authorities whether they are 'resident', 'non-resident' or 'domiciled' here. You cannot answer the question without learning what they mean. Each is a distinction in law that has to be explained on the form or in notes.

I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't misjudged the small print. Based on this study, perhaps printing vital contract information in grey five point type is to help us understand it better.

And by the way, I'm starting to feel sorry for Comic Sans. Can we stop bullying it? If it looked like it does and was called Posh Sans or Cool Sans then there might be a case for mocking, but isn't the clue in the name? Perfectly reasonable to have a font like that to choose from.

Mind you, being offered Comic Sans as one of the choices for my father's funeral did make me wonder whether font licenses shouldn't require a test, like driving licenses do....

Rob Waller


On 6 Jun 2011, at 01:11, Deborah Taylor-Pearce <[email protected]> wrote:

> Jorge wrote:
> 
>> If I were to design hospital
>> forms that are difficult to
>> fill up, maybe people will
>> pay more attention, but at
>> the end of the day they will
>> be exhausted.
> 
> But this is an entirely different genre, no?
> 
> Most hospital forms are usually intended for record-keeping or some 
> other administrative purpose.
> 
> That doesn't mean we can't learn from them, but I don't think we often 
> do ... nor would this be their primary purpose.
> 
> So, I wouldn't think the study's authors -- who, for the most part, 
> are careful not to make extravagant claims about the 
> "generalizability" of their findings -- would recommend designing 
> hospital forms in Haettenschweiler.
> 
> (And speaking of hospital forms, there was an amusing segment a few 
> weeks ago on U.S. Public Radio's _Marketplace_ about the unintended 
> consequences of "disfluent" medical communications:
> 
>     originally aired on _Marketplace_, Thursday, May 12, 2011
>     "What's in a drug name?"
> 
> http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/05/12/pm-whats-in-a-drug-name/
> 
> I particularly liked the comment by respondent Tom Goodenow (below the 
> transcript, towards the bottom of the page):
> 
>     "(In order to minimize errors by the filling pharmacist and
>     avoid confusion by patients, physicians are taught in medical
>     school to indicate on the instructions line of the
>     prescription the condition for which a drug is being
>     prescribed; but few doctors take the time or make the effort
>     to do this.)"
> 
> And I doubt that switching over to Comic Sans is going to motivate 
> prescription-writing doctors any better, or enable "deeper processing" 
> by pharmacists.... ;-)
> 
> 

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