Information Design Journal - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2013

There are strong indications that many people increasingly resist reading medium-to-long documents. It is therefore important to contribute to the long-term viability of longer documents by providing better support for selective reading. Readers may be more willing to read longer documents knowing they have ample and near-seamless choices regarding which topics they can read and the level of detail at which they can read a particular topic. To design for selective reading requires an understanding of how readers deal with incomplete information and the concepts of prerequisite information and dependency relationships. Three broad approaches can be identified: building supported reading pathways, modularization, and summarization.

Some typographers have proposed that typeface familiarity is defined by the amount of time that a reader has been exposed to a typeface design, while other typographers have proposed that familiarity is defined by the commonalities in letter shapes. These two hypotheses were tested by measuring the reading speed and preferences of participants. Participants were tested twice with common and uncommon letter shapes, once before and once after spending 20 minutes reading a story with the font. The results indicate that the exposure period has an effect on the speed of reading, but the uncommon letter shapes did not. Readers did not like the uncommon letter shapes. This has implications for the selection of type and the design of future typefaces.

Research on smoking behavior suggests that less well-educated adolescents are most susceptible to taking up smoking. This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the effects of adapting fear appeals to this target group. Threats were manipulated in terms of content (long-term health versus short-term cosmetic effects) and form (image versus text). Results demonstrated that, for long-term health fear appeals, text was considered as easier, and was better understood and evaluated, than image. These results illustrate the advantage of using fear texts over fear images when targeting less well-educated adolescents and the importance of adapting anti-smoking advertisements to this group.

Human-centered design approaches are intended to provide designers with tools to improve the interaction between design objects and their human users. Often, the design principles of these approaches try to cover broad human requirements, but not particular human differences relevant to use and communication. This paper is a study of visual intelligence and mood as two of the major hypothesized human differences for visual communication design. Evidence shows that visual intelligence predicts adequate interaction patterns and that two dimensions of mood – high tense arousal and anger/frustration – negatively affect the interaction with visual information. The data also suggests that mood change might be negatively associated with interaction experience, showing that mood effects have the potential to be used as a measurement of interaction design quality.

This study compares the usability of a general heuristic evaluation to that of a domain-specific heuristic evaluation focused on technical documentation. Eight technical writers used both heuristic evaluations to identify usability problems in an online help application. The validity of the usability problems they identified was ascertained by user testing. No significant difference was found in overall effectiveness or efficiency. However, writers indicated greater satisfaction with the general heuristic evaluation, while the domain-specific heuristic evaluation was more effective in some categories and showed greater inter-rater agreement. Results suggest that differences in effectiveness were related to the level of detail of the heuristics. This study therefore recommends the incorporation of more detailed heuristics into heuristic evaluations.

People often read to fulfill the requirement of a task that demands comprehension, which can be called task-oriented reading. Task- oriented reading activities are associated with reading literacy competencies promoted by international reading literacy assessment programs and definitions of reading skills that emphasize the role of the reader, the tasks, and the social context in reading. Task- oriented reading situations place specific self-regulatory demands on readers that go beyond the scope of comprehension processes considered by current theories and models of comprehension.Read&Answer is an application developed to record actions and reading time on task-oriented situations in an electronic environment. In this paper we describe Read&Answer and summarize studies on the impact that tasks of different nature have on how readers interact with a text and their final performance, as well as some strategies specific to task-oriented reading situations.

Formal medical modeling is the basis for the systematic acquisition and analysis of medical data with the critical goals of reaching informed decisions in treatment and performing meaningful clinical research. While the semantic web provides a promising technology, the user experience of formal modeling remains largely unaddressed. Starting out from the view that evidence and knowledge presentation have a fundamental role in knowledge elicitation, an argument is made that working backwards from the goals which information systems strive to fulfill, the end user applications and the genuine context they provide, towards the underlying formalisms can lead to new and more accessible approaches in formal knowledge modeling.