Development of an Intuitive User-Centric Font Selection Menu

The font selection menu in most application software’s is arranged alphabetically; in recent years one can also see the split menu approach being used. An alphabetical arrangement presupposes that the users are aware of the font characteristics and usage scenario through its name. Unless the font name specifies it; the scheme does not in any which way indicate the morphological features or the usage scenarios of a given font. In order to address these issues, a set of systematic experiments was conducted to capture the typeface classification strategies of users with a modified card sorting technique. The collected data was subjected to hierarchical clustering algorithms to come up with a collective user-centric classification system for Devanagari fonts. The classes created by this method appears to address the problems raised by alphabetical orderings by allowing the groupings to be more intuitive (and realistic) while retaining statistical validity over large user sets.