Information Design Journal - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2007

Pictorial assembly instructions are a common element of many consumer products however there is very little research published about their design, particularly regarding the creation of effective illustrations. This paper reviews published work that offers best practice guidelines for the design of pictorial assembly instructions. The application of the guidelines is discussed in the context of a project to design assembly instructions for a flat pack wheelchair for distribution in developing countries. The paper will present findings from diagnostic testing with users in Sri Lanka.

The present paper reports three experiments investigating the effect typographic design of examination materials has on performance. Significant differences in performance were always found in all three experiments. These differences were always in favour of text and/or question and answer sheet layouts conforming to legibility guidelines. Participants also considered the questions with these layouts easy to answer. The main conclusion was that text and question and answer sheet layouts displaying a combination of typographic features intended to improve legibility facilitate efficient search reading and answering of questions at the perceptual level of reading. The effect of typographic layout on performance should therefore be considered in order to construct valid and reliable examination materials.

Website hierarchy is a central principle for organizing information in websites with implications for user orientation on the Web. Employing websites for children as case studies, this paper proposes a conceptualization of website hierarchy developed by adapting a tool from systemic functional linguistics to the analysis of websites. This new conceptualization draws on the strengths and reconciles the differences of existing ones in order to reflect the fluidity of websites as hypermedia texts on the WWW and the role that the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design plays in revealing a website's hierarchical organization and thereby orienting users within it.