Investigating the effects of user age on readability

Abstract

This paper focuses on creating a guideline for style, line spacing, size, text box and age group combinations of Korean fonts for different electronic displays. Reading time and recall time were measured to analyze the readabilities among various typographical layouts. The importance of typographical elements were different among the age group: line height and font sizes are the most important element for 20s to skim through the documents; font style and line height for 30s; line height and font size for 50+. Although, 20s, 30s and 50s had similarities on recalling speed since the font size and the line heights were the two most important readability elements. Thus, it is clear that the typographical layouts need to be designed differently based on the target user of the design. The optimized font combination for readability was also generated. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.