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

  • Authors:

  • Polle T. Zellweger;Susan Harkness Regli;Jock D. Mackinlay;Bay-Wei Chang

  • Affiliations:

  • Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Baker Hall 259, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, PA and Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

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 differenccs 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.