Legible, are you sure ? An experimentation-based typographical design in safety-critical context

Jean-Luc Vinot (1, 2) , Sylvie Athènes (3)

1 LII - ENAC - Equipe Informatique Interactive
2 IRIT-ICS - Interactive Critical Systems
3 PRISSMH - Programme Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Sciences du Sport et du Mouvement Humain

Designing Safety-critical interfaces entails proving the safety and operational usability of each component. Largely taken for granted in everyday interface design, the typographical component, through its legibility and aesthetics, weighs heavily on the ubiquitous reading task at the heart of most visualizations and interactions. In this paper, we present a research project whose goal is the creation of a new typeface to display textual information on future aircraft interfaces. After an initial task analysis leading to the definition of specific needs, requirements and design principles, the design constantly evolves from an iterative cycle of design and experimentation. We present three experiments (laboratory and cockpit) used mainly to validate initial choices and fine-tune font properties. Results confirm the importance of rigorously testing the typographical component as a part of text output evaluation in interactive systems.

Mots clés: design; evaluation; typography; legibility; readability; aircraft; Author Keywords Design; Safety-critical; cockpit; Miscellaneous General Terms Design; Experimentation; Human Factors

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Jean-Luc Vinot, Sylvie Athènes. Legible, are you sure ? An experimentation-based typographical design in safety-critical context. CHI 2012, ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2012, Austin, United States. pp 2287-2296, ⟨10.1145/2207676.2208387⟩. ⟨hal-01022511⟩