The effects of headings in information mapping on search speed and evaluation of a brief health education text

  • Authors:
  • Marieke Kools;Robert A.C. Ruiter;Margaretha W.J. Van De Wiel;Gerjo Kok

  • Affiliations:
  • Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands;Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands;Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands;Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Information Science
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The accessibility of written information becomes an increasinglyrelevant issue in today's information-dense society. Althoughheadings are generally known to signal textual content and thus aidaccess, it remains unclear how frequently headings should be usedfor optimal document use. Information Mapping© is a textwriting method that systematically splits up text in chunksaccompanied by headings. The present paper presents a study inwhich a print health education document was varied systematicallyin accordance with the Information Mapping method, to examine theeffects of heading frequency and information order on participants'search speed and their evaluation of the text layout. Resultsshowed that the presence of headings in a text indeed contributedto easier access in the search tasks. Although no differences insearch speed were found with varying numbers of headings in thetext, some subjective opinions were in favour of the version withmost headings. The different information order of the InformationMapping text had no effect.