The impact of fluid documents on reading and browsing: an observational study

Fluid Documents incorporate additional information into a page by adjusting typography using interactive animation. One application is to support hypertext browsing by providing glosses for link anchors. This paper describes an observational study of the impact of Fluid Documents on reading and browsing. The study involved six conditions that differ along several dimensions, including the degree of typographic adjustment and the distance glosses are placed from anchors. Six subjects read and answered questions about two hypertext corpora while being monitored by an eyetracker. The eyetracking data revealed no substantial differences in eye behavior between conditions. Gloss placement was significant: subjects required less time to use nearby glosses. Finally, the reaction to the conditions was highly varied, with several conditions receiving both a best and worst rating on the subjective questionnaires. These results suggest implications for the design of dynamic reading environments....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Polle Zellweger, Susan Harkness Regli, Jock D. Mackinlay, Bay-Wei Chang
• Keywords: CHI 2000, Fluid Documents, Glosses, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Fluid User