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Green on yellow is best for readability 10 Apr 2007
That's right. According to a readability study performed by Alyson L. Hill from the Department of Psychology at Stephen F. Austin State University, green text on a yellow background is better than good old black-and-white when it comes to web readability (Take a look at the paper itself for an example of the green-on-yellow colour combination in action).
Other findings from HIll's research include:
- Green on yellow is the best colour scheme in the most conditions - except for italicised Arial, for which it's the worst.
- Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial. (Surprising when you consider that most usability experts recommend san-serif fonts for on-screen reading).
- The combination which gives the fastest response time is italicised (!) green Times New Roman on yellow background.
- Black-on-grey is much faster to parse than black-on-white.
Interesting stuff!
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18 comments so far
Mark Thomas 10 Apr 2007 10:02 AM
Interesting stuff indeed. Can't quite get my head around the green text, but the yellow bg seems logical. After all, the printed word usually appears on cream- or off-white-coloured paper (see most novels), as the reflective nature of white paper would distract readers.
Tom 10 Apr 2007 11:19 AM
@Mark: Not sure you can compare reading from paper to reading from a screen. Paper reflects light (as you point out), but a monitor emits it.
Brian O\'Callaghan 10 Apr 2007 01:10 PM
I bet the result would have been different if they had tested yellow on black / black on yellow. These combos have come up trumps in many of the other studies I've read.
Jake Cohen 10 Apr 2007 06:22 PM
I find it a bit annoying that a study on readability publishes its results in columns that take up the entire width of the browser. It's long been established that it's much easier to read text in narrower columns.
Simon 12 Apr 2007 09:18 AM
Mark, Tom, Brian, Jake: Thanks for your interesting comments.
FYI I've just added a post that documents further evidence supporting yellow-green colour schemes - see "Fire engines are supposed to be red, right?"
Torley 13 Apr 2007 09:48 PM
@Jake: Brilliant observation. I feel the same way, very odd how Jakob Nielsen does it so much. Yes, I could shrink my web browser, but then that crunches all my other tabs too.
Kevin Crossman 13 Apr 2007 10:29 PM
This is interesting, but a study from 1997?
Lana 13 Apr 2007 10:30 PM
The green on yellow certainly does pop out and is very clear to read. However I do have one question - did they test this on colour-blind people? My brother-in-law has problems with green and red hues, so the intensity of the green lettering could be less pronounced and may even blend some into the yellow. Just a thought...
Kendall 14 Apr 2007 01:51 PM
Well I have to disagree. When I look at their web page with the green on yellow it's harder for me to read. It lacks the contrast. Also the serif font reduces. I have the Firefox Web Developer toolbar installed so I can play with the font and colors and green on black is not the best combo.
Michael Zuschlag 17 Apr 2007 02:41 AM
Actually, it’s not clear from their results if green on yellow is better than black on medium gray. The RT for italicized TNR GR/Y seems the same as for non-italicized TNR BK/MG in two experiments using “the exact same setup.” But don’t go changing your web page colors in any case. This is performance for scanning for a target word in body of text, not for reading. I don’t think the two are well-correlated. The conclusion that one should have intermediate contrast might have implications for font and color selection of menus (where users scan for a word), except for one other thing: several of the F’s are marginally significant, and I see no sign of controlling for family-wise error rates in the (many) comparisons among the means (e.g., Tukey HSD). In other words, zeroing on the best performing combination is risky; it could be sampling error. I’d wait for more research. The finding that TNR font isn’t so bad, however, has been replicated elsewhere (e.g., see SURL’s work such as http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/41/onlinetext.htm).
catwalker 5 Oct 2009 11:08 PM
I agree with Michael Z. Another clue that these data are not the last word is that there doesn't seem to be a pattern from one font to another. Why would a color combination be the best with one font and the worst with another? There's something else going on here.
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