Comic Sans for Everyone
Comic Sans for Everyone
Here at Google, the Webmaster Team is always running experiments and conducting research to improve user experience and increase conversion rates across our websites.
Following some rigorous user testing of 41 different fonts, investigating how each affected user experience, we discovered one font consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates: Comic Sans.
We’ll therefore be rolling out Comic Sans as our default font across all Google products on April 4, 2011.
For today only, we’re inviting a limited number of lucky Google users to take part in our Google Labs Trusted Tester Beta Preview Sandbox program. To participate, follow these easy steps:
Your account will be automatically activated once the extension is installed, allowing you to browse the entire World Wide Web using Comic Sans. In the extremely unlikely event that you decide to opt-out of the preview, you can simply disable or uninstall the extension by visiting your Extensions page.
For the latest news and updates, be sure to follow @GoogleWebTeam on Twitter.
The data from our experiments with Wingdings in AdSense last year helped us realize that our users prefer it when web pages and web applications “pop” and feel more friendly, resulting in an all round better user experience.
Eye tracking: The intense areas shown on the Comic Sans heat map (left) shows that users thoroughly read every piece of content displayed in Comic Sans. For the Arial version on the right, we see a more conventional eye tracking pattern.
Whether it’s search results, text ads, emails, or documents, our research has consistently shown that the most effective way to achieve user happiness and higher conversion rates is to use the Comic Sans font.
Website owners can help with our font experiments by using Google Web Fonts on their own sites. While Comic Sans unfortunately isn’t available, our research shows that Reenie Beanie is pretty fun for users too.
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