If it's easy to read, people believe it

A few years ago, researchers at the University of Michigan ran an experiment that sounds almost too simple to be interesting. They gave people the same set of instructions for a recipe. One group got the instructions printed in a clean, easy-to-read font. The other group got the exact same words in a decorative, harder-to-read font.

Then they asked both groups: how long do you think this recipe would take to make?

The easy-to-read group estimated about 8 minutes. The hard-to-read group estimated nearly twice that, around 15 minutes. Same recipe. Same steps. Same words. The only difference was how easy the text was to process visually.

The group that struggled to read the instructions assumed the task itself would be harder.

I’ve been thinking about this experiment for months because I think it explains a pattern I keep running into in product design, one that has nothing to do with fonts specifically and everything to do with how people decide whether something is worth their time.

The concept

Psychologists call it processing fluency. It’s the ease with which your brain takes in and makes sense of information. And here’s what makes it interesting for designers: when something is easy to process, people don’t just find it easier to understand. They find it more trustworthy, more true, and more valuable.

This isn’t a conscious judgment. Your brain uses processing fluency as a shortcut. If information flows smoothly, it must be reliable. If it’s confusing or takes effort, something must be off.

The research on this is surprisingly broad. Stocks with easy-to-pronounce ticker symbols outperform those with awkward ones in the short term. Statements printed in high-contrast text are rated as more truthful than the same statements in low contrast. Products with simpler names are rated as safer. The pattern keeps showing up: easy to process = easy to trust.

And the reverse is just as powerful. When something feels hard to process, people don’t just disengage. They actively downgrade their opinion of it. They assume the product is complicated, the company is disorganized, or the task isn’t worth the effort.

Where this shows up in design

Once you start looking for processing fluency problems in products, you see them everywhere.

Onboarding flows that feel overwhelming. Not because there are too many steps, but because each step has too much text, too many options, or unclear visual hierarchy. The user’s brain hits friction. And instead of thinking “this step is poorly designed,” they think “this product seems complicated.” The product gets blamed for the feeling, not the screen.

I ran into this with Brisk. Early prototypes of the invoice setup had all the right information on the screen. Client name, amount, due date, currency, payment terms, notes. Technically complete. But when I watched freelancers go through it, they’d pause, scan the screen, and visibly hesitate. A couple of them said “there’s a lot going on here.”

There wasn’t. There were six fields. But the layout made it feel like more. The spacing was tight, the labels were long, and everything competed for attention at the same level. I spread the same six fields across two steps, shortened the labels, and added clear visual grouping. Same information, less cognitive friction. The hesitation disappeared.

I didn’t add anything. I didn’t remove anything. I made it easier to process.

Pricing pages that confuse instead of convert. Most pricing pages I see fail not because the prices are wrong, but because comparing the options requires too much mental work. Three plans side by side with 15 feature rows, checkmarks scattered everywhere, footnotes at the bottom. The user’s brain has to build a mental model of what each plan includes, hold it in working memory, and compare.

That’s a processing fluency nightmare. And when processing is hard, the most common response is to do nothing. People leave. Not because they don’t want the product, but because choosing felt like work.

The fix is usually the same: reduce what you’re asking the brain to hold. Highlight the differences between plans, not the full feature list. Recommend one option. Make the comparison easy, and the decision follows.

Settings and configuration screens. I mentioned the “notification frequency” vs. “how often we email you” rewrite in a previous issue. That’s a processing fluency fix. System-language labels require the user to translate. User-language labels don’t. Every translation step is friction, and friction erodes trust.

The same thing happens with toggles that use double negatives (”disable notification suppression”), dropdown menus with 20 items when 4 would do, and help text that’s longer than the thing it’s explaining.

Error messages, again. “An unexpected error has occurred (code: 4032-B)” requires processing. “We couldn’t save your invoice. Try again in a few seconds.” doesn’t. The first one makes the user work. The second one does the work for them.

The part that surprised me

The thing about processing fluency that I didn’t expect is how much it affects perception of quality. Not usability. Quality.

In one study, people rated products as higher quality when the product descriptions were written in simple, clear language compared to the exact same products described with complex vocabulary. The complicated descriptions didn’t make the products seem more sophisticated. They made them seem less trustworthy.

I think about this every time I see a landing page stuffed with jargon. “AI-powered workflow optimization platform with seamless cross-functional integration capabilities.” That sentence is hard to process. And the user’s brain, without even realizing it, quietly downgrades its trust in whatever you’re selling.

Compare that with: “We help your team get work done faster by cutting the busywork.” Same idea. One version your brain slides through. The other one requires a second read.

The simpler version doesn’t just communicate better. It makes the product feel better. Processing fluency turns clarity into credibility.

A quick way to test for it

I’ve started doing something simple before I ship any screen, page, or flow. I call it the squint test, although I’m sure other designers have their own version of this.

I pull up the design and literally squint at it. Everything goes blurry. What I’m looking for is whether the visual hierarchy still works when I can’t read the actual words. Can I tell what’s most important? Can I see where to start? Does the layout guide my eye or does everything blur into one undifferentiated block?

If it’s a blur, the processing fluency is low. The user’s brain will have to work to figure out the structure. And that work, even if it’s just a few hundred milliseconds, gets translated into a feeling. A feeling that this is complicated. That this isn’t for me. That maybe I’ll come back later (and never do).

The other test is even simpler: read your copy out loud. If you stumble, your users will stumble. If you have to re-read a sentence to understand it, so will they. And every stumble is a tiny crack in trust.

Why this matters more right now

AI-generated interfaces are getting better at layout, spacing, and visual polish. They’re still bad at processing fluency because fluency isn’t about how something looks. It’s about how it feels to a specific person in a specific context doing a specific task.

An AI can generate a clean settings page. It doesn’t know that your users are freelancers who are already stressed about money and need everything to feel effortless. It doesn’t know that showing all payment options at once will overwhelm someone who just wants to send an invoice and move on.

Processing fluency is contextual judgment. It requires knowing your user well enough to predict where their brain will hit friction. That’s still a very human skill.

Make it easy to read and people will believe it. Make it easy to scan and people will use it. Make it easy to process and people will trust it.

Your product’s credibility starts before anyone evaluates your features. It starts the moment their brain decides whether this feels easy or hard.

Make it feel easy.

Thanks for reading :) If something in this issue resonated, please reply and tell me.

Even one line. These replies are my favorite part of writing this newsletter.

See you next Thursday 🙌

— Balint

What else I’m working on?