The Influence of Typeface and Case on Critical Care Systems Performance (Medical Ventilator)

Abstract

Usability evaluation is a basic tool for investigating a system's performance in different environments. Many studies found a positive influence of different user interface aesthetics and their organization on usability ratings. These design aspects are one of the most important characteristics of systems usability, and few empirical studies have been examining the importance of typography specifically for safety-critical systems. This study aimed to investigate how different typographic factors, i.e., typeface and fontcase, influence a user's performance in health care safety-critical systems. Different study variables were considered, including task completion time, reflection time, and the total number of touches. To test the study objectives, the Hamilton-c6 ventilator prototype was developed. The experiments were conducted on 15 participants, including male and female physicians, in a controlled environment from different healthcare venues. A well-known technique, one-way ANOVA, was used to assess the data. The results suggest a significant difference between serif (times new roman) and sans serif (Calibri) groups for task completion time; in addition to that, the difference between fontcase groups (sentence case, lowercase, and uppercase) was not statistically significant. Moreover, this study investigated the pairwise influence of different typeface and fontcase groups. The results show a significant difference in task completion time. The descriptive analysis of different groups shows that the times new roman with the upper case group has the lowest task completion time while the Calibri with the uppercase groups have the highest task completion time. This study may pave a good research direction to explore the impact of these and other aesthetic factors in multiple contexts.