A Diary Study of Work-Related Reading: Design Implications for Digital Reading Devices

In this paper we describe a diary study of how people read in the course of their daily working lives. Fifteen people from a wide variety of professions were asked to log their daily document activity for a period of 5 consecutive working days. Using structured interviews, we analysed their reading activities in detail. We examine the range of reading activities that our subjects carried out, and then present findings relating to both common characteristics and variation across the sample. From these findings, we discuss some implications for the design of digital reading devices. KEYWORDS reading, writing, paper documents, digital document readers, design, diary study, field study, electronic books, virtual paper, user behaviour

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Annette Adler, Anuj Gujar, Beverly L. Harrison, Kenton O'Hara, Abigail Sellen
• Keywords: CHI 1998, Consecutive Working Days, Diary Study, Human Computer Interaction, Reading Activities