I just read an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review that reviewed a study done with college students to measure reading retention.  As the study found, the more difficult the font was to read, the better the retention of the topic was among the students!  Yup, that’s right…the more difficult it was for the students to read, the better they understood and retained the information.  In fact the students that read information printed with difficult fonts had a lift of 14% in their retention rate.

Now we know that this probably wouldn’t work within the online channel as the attention span is exceptionally short and the user isn’t governed by a professor, however, it does make you wonder if utilizing difficult fonts for specific content that we want to ‘jolt’ the user with would have a positive impact.

What do you think, anyone interested in doing some A/B testing on their site to try this out?

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