What's your type?
Concept to development-ready UI
A web-based survey for the Computational Creativity Lab to assess the sentiments associated with open-source web fonts.
Overview
Open-source fonts are ubiquitous on the Web, and yet we understand very little about the implicit connotations and underlying perceptions that users have of them. Nor do we understand how these perceptions vary across cultures and languages. What’s Your Type seeks to understand these font connotations and perceptions through a web-based survey.
The survey asks users to pick the font that best matches an emotive adjective—including “playful,” “informative,” and “trendy.” By gathering user responses, What’s Your Type crowdsources a database of font preferences, searchable by language and nationality of the respondent.
Outcome
A short promotional video for What's Your Type and communicate the survey's purpose: understanding the implicit connotations of open-source web fonts.
Before beginning, a brief popup explains the structure and purpose of the survey. We found that written instructions as well as a short animation helped prevent confusion once users began the survey.
An example of a survey question. Users are asked to pick the font that best matches an emotive adjective like "quirky." Background gradients for each keyword help users easily distinguish the questions from one another.
The mobile layout, changing the card layout to ensure legibility of the typeface options and moving the survey progress to stretch across the bottom of the screen.
After completing the survey, users can see how they're choices compared with other respondents. Did they associate typefaces with the same adjectives as other users? Users can filter results by the nationality and language of the respondent to get a sense of how typeface preferences vary.
In addition to the final UI mockups and survey logic, final design deliverables included a set of annotated screens to communicate interactions patterns to the development team.
Accomplishments
This project was funded with an initial seed grant from the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. At the conclusion of the design phase, final design materials were presented to lab and university leaders, who were thrilled with the idea of creating a database of font preferences across the globe and the fidelity of the final designs. Lab leadership are currently pursuing additional funding to develop and launch the survey and database.
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