Uniformly lacking in clarity

Noise Between Stations pulls a particularly interesting finding from Elaine Toms' Recognizing Digital Genre experiment. In brief, the use of "digital documents" is greatly enhanced when their structure conforms to regular and logical patterns of elements. But clearly not all information fits well into the same structure, so the tendency of digital publishing, including onscreen help, to wedge every document into a uniform design and template likely eliminates, or at least compromises, the visual clues that readers need to make sense of the content.

Posted: February 8, 2004 link to this item, Tweet this item, respond to this item