Determining the Usefulness of Colour and Fontsin a Programming

This paper reports on the results of an experiment that was run in order to help determine if colour or font size was more useful for displaying code in a programming task, and if so, which was more useful. The null hypothesis of the experiment was that neither colour nor font size were of any beneet to users in programming tasks. The null hypothesis was refuted. It was determined that the colour display mechanism both lessened the time taken to perform a code optimization task, and was preferred by subjects. The use of the font size display mechanism showed no signiicant beneets.