If you want customers or members to fill out a form or volunteer their time, writes Roger Dooley at the Neuromarketing blog, "you will be more successful if you describe the task in a simple, easy to read typeface." The reason? When something can be completed in a shorter period of time, people are more likely to comply with the request—and less complex fonts create the impression that it will go more quickly.

Dooley cites research by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz, who asked two groups to estimate the amount of time required for identical exercise regimens.

The first group read instructions in Arial—a simple, streamlined font:

For the second group, Song and Schwarz used the much-fussier Brush font:

"The results were astounding," notes Dooley. "[T]he subjects who read the same instructions in the hard to read font estimated that the regimen would take nearly twice as long, 15.1 minutes vs. 8.2 minutes."

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