Text alignment for display of business opening hours

Question

There's a great question about the input of opening hours but I want to ask specifically about displaying opening hours.

What is the most readable text alignment to use for displaying opening hours? One of the accepted ways seems to be left-aligned days with the opening and closing times both (separately) left-aligned. So basically everything is left aligned in its own column. Here's an example I found on the web:

When I started thinking about this question, I thought that right-aligning the days would work better. This way has only one alignment point, the colon between days and hours.

But that doesn't seem to be that normal for displaying times.

Answer 1

Your top example is way more readable. It's clean, spaced, and your eyes naturally flow through the days and times.

Here's several different ways the alignment and format could look:

Side Note:

Remember to use a monospaced or fixed-width font like Consolas or Courier so that everything lines up nicely.

Answer 2

Left aligned text is easier to read than centered or right aligned text. This is because when you center or right align your text, the starting place of each line changes. This forces your users to work harder to find where each line begins to continue reading. Without a straight left edge, there is no consistent place where users can move their eyes to when they complete each line.

However, when your text is left aligned, a straight left edge appears. Users can read each line by simply moving their eyes to the left edge each time. This makes paragraphs or lines of text faster and easier to read because the user’s eyes don’t have to work as hard to find where the line starts each time.