Not more baseball…
I’m wondering what is the optimum visual field or display size for reading on a computer screen?
I haven’t been able to find an easy answer to this question for a number of reasons and what I’ve found for research indicates many conflicting studies. One difficulty is that you have to really define what optimum means. Are you optimizing for speed, comprehension, or satisfaction? Also the size of the documents you are reading can change the optimizing factors for presenting it.
So here’s a compilation of research papers that I’ve found related to the Visual Field, Optimum Display Size, whatever you want to call it problem.
The Effects of Line Length on Children and Adults’ Online Reading Performance [ pdf ]
Adults were measured against children in 3 sets of line length for reading time and effective reading score yet no real differences were found. What is interesting is the perceived results, only in adults found the narrow to medium line length (45 – 76 CPL – characters per line) to be preferred when compared to the full length (132 CPL).
The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News [ pdf ]
Twenty college-age students were given news articles to read displaying in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line from a computer monitor. The results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed with no effects for comprehension or satisfaction other than strong preferences for sizes.
The Effect of display size on reading and manipulating electronic text [ pdf ]
An attempt at more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of “real-world” texts. Participants were given journal articles for comprehension and a software manual for specific information. Indications that screen size does not play a major factor in performance on either task and readers prefer larger screens. (no kidding!)
Reading and skimming from computer screens and books: the paperless office revisited?
Previous research made conclusions from the screens of the 1980s vs. paper, however when comparing against high quality CRTs speed and comprehension are equivalent. However skimming on a CRT is still 41% slower than from a book, reasons for this finding are discussed.
Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text
A fantastic overview of a lot of different research that has taken place with breakdowns of key variable components of each experiment. If you only read one paper this is likely the best one to get a handle on the situation.
Cited in several other papers but I couldn’t track down an available source for this paper.
Please leave comments for other related research articles, I’d love to be able to find more information on this topic.
Nice review Bryan. My take is that human reading processes, especially at the gaze & input level, that it’s really hard to mess that up with a simple manipulation of width.
You might pick up a bit from our: Gugerty, L., Tyrrell, R. A., Aten, T. R. & Edmonds, K. A. (2004). The effects of subpixel addressing on users’ performance and preferences during reading-related tasks. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 1(2), 81-101. http://people.clemson.edu/%7Egugerty/Gugerty%20et%20al%20TAP%202004.pdf
One conjecture is that what holds true today will not be true when computer displays begin to exceed the resolution of typical printed works — not for a while to come alas.
Whoops, make that “My take is that human reading processes, especially at the gaze & input level, are so well learned and automatic … that it’s really hard to mess that up with a simple manipulation of text width.”
Thank you for this nice blog post!
I use Pivot with my TFT for some years now. Resolution: 1024×1280, and: It’s perfect!
perfect for what?
Web sites
Office documents
PDFs
image galleries
…
I will buy a Sony PRS 505 in the next time …
I wondered if long lines would be a problem when I got a 22″ widescreen monitor a while back. What I’ve found is that long lines only become a problem in large, unseparated quantities. If the author understands the word ‘paragraph’ you end up with a bunch of blocks of text that are only like 2 lines long. As long as it’s not line after line after line with no space between them, I don’t find it to be a problem.
However, I don’t keep my IRC window maximized anymore. I keep it full-width, but only about half-height. If it’s maximized, it becomes overload.
One of the absolute best “CS” books I own has nothing to do with CS but everything to do with how the brain works during reading tasks, and why: it’s a psychology book from 1983: “The Psychology of Reading”, Taylor & Taylor. Well worth finding a copy if you were interested enough to track down those articles and write this blog post.
http://scholar.google.co.kr/scholar?q=author:%22Taylor%22+intitle:%22The+Psychology+of+Reading
FWIW I like your line lengths in this blog, though your right margin is a little cramped and the font isn’t great. Something that in cross-section looks like a medium-large type hardback book just feels easy to read. At Zoom > Reset in FF3.1 on my 1280×1024 19″ LCD with Windows XP Font size “Normal”; those lines are about 81-85 characters per line. I think with a tuned serif you could go to 90.
Of course there’s the ultimate in old-skool readability, http://www.suck.com/daily/96/12/06/daily.html
A bit of a review of research here:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/nov02.asp
From the print world, Robert Bringhurst (Elements of Typographic Style, a book to love) tells us:
“Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal. For multiple column work, a better average is 40 to 50 characters.”
but, of course, that’s from print-land, where we can dictate the size of the font. On a computer screen, probably better to go with lengths rather than number of characters, seeing as it has to do with whether the eye gets lost in the middle of too long a line vs. having to change lines to often.
A very interesting discussion!
I am more specifically looking to see if anyone has studied display sizes for people who have poor vision, but some of the papers listed are pertinent.
One thing to keep in mind, particularly for older viewers, is that the population wearing bifocals and having limited eye focusing adaptability may
be fixed at the distance that their bifocals focus (usually about 16″ inches). Wider screens would require that they move their heads or sway left and right, since the sides of the screen are farther away than the center of the screen. (think Pythagorean equation). Without moving, the sides would be blurry. This is not an issue for youger people, who can still focus their eyes.
Nice review, thanks for sharing!