A Study of Simplified Chinese Typeface Design applied to Automotive User Interface

The readability of Text-rich human machine interface (HMI) has been an increasingly pivotal for the automotive user interface (AUI) in China. The illegible typeface in AUI tends to beget drive distraction which may ramp up the incidence of traffic accidents. We devised a rapid test in two different typefaces for evaluating the readability of Simplified Chinese typefaces. The results show that readability in AUI could be significantly impacted by typeface. In addition, the result suggests that user performance could be partly affected by gender and driving frequency. Furthermore, the differences in the behaviors of glancing could be hardly narrowed when the text size was enlarged form 5mm to 6mm in driving context.