Information Design Journal - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2008

Due to changes in legislation, the Dutch tax department has become responsible for several allowances as well. This forces the department to improve the affective and motivational responses to its forms. In an attempt to do so, the department has included photographs and examples in a form for reimbursement of medical care costs. This form was tested in a field experiment by comparing it with three versions from which either photographs, examples or both were removed. 242 senior citizens gave their evaluations after working with one of these form versions. The inclusion of photos and examples appeared to make the form more attractive, less discouraging, and a bit more favourable for the image of the tax department. It also led to more self-confidence, but only among false optimists, i.e., those who actually had their answers wrong became more certain about their performance. A post-hoc analysis revealed that the scores on affective and motivational aspects correlated strongly, and almost exclusively, with the perceived intelligibility of a form. The addition of feelgood elements seems to be of limited relevance.

Louis Rosenfeld is one of the world’s leading and bestknown information architects. If he initially earned his reputation from his best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and his first company, Argus Associates, he has maintained it through his newest venture, Rosenfeld Media (which publishes books on the topic of User Experience design), through his ongoing consulting, and his service to establishing the field of information architecture by helping to found the Information Architecture Institute and the User Experience Network (UXnet). In this interview, he shares his thoughts about the growth and practice of information architecture, the limitations of current publishing models and some of the challenges in assigning terminology in this field.

This study uses preference measurements to compare participants’ perceptions of nine versions of on-screen instructions and aims to discover the ones users consider to be the clearest and most comfortable to use. Instructions are divided into 3 categories: composite instructions, synoptic instructions and animated demonstrations. A group of twenty-four adult participants ranked instructions, first within the same category and then between categories. Even though no data was gathered to suggest which type of instruction will lead to better learning, the results show that animations are perceived as being the clearest and most comfortable to use. Users are likely to welcome animations, particularly for learning highly dynamic and non-intuitive software drawing tasks (i.e., using Bezier tools).

This paper examines the potential significance of typographic variation in the front pages of a corpus of Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral theses. Some account is taken of the linguistic content of these pages, but the primary focus is on typographic resources such as font choice, salience, and layout. It is found that there is a strong association between the nature of the typographic choices and the disciplinary orientation. Specifically, the more marked semiotic resources are likely to be associated with theses which are oriented towards the “New Humanities”, that is, adopting a more subjective approach to research.