Designing Usable Electronic Text, Second Edition (PDF)

Is the paperless world ever going to arrive? Will e-text and digital documents replace the book any time soon? Despite all the hype, the consumption of paper continues to increase as word processing becomes cheaper and easier. And with the growth of the World Wide Web, information is increasingly being presented to readers in large quantities and in forms that can be rapidly searched to suit their needs.
However, poor design and a failure to consider the user often act against effectiveness in communication. Andrew Dillon explores the human issues underlying information usage, and stresses that usability (or the lack of it) remains a barrier to the digital medium's campaign to gain mass acceptance. In synthesizing the research findings and articulating a framework for evaluation he shows how designers can take a user-centred approach to the presentation of information that will better enable them to create the digital documents that people will use.
This is a revision of the successful first edition, with a new emphasis on the Web and hypertext design and their impacts. With the emergence of new uses of information, such as e-commerce and telemedicine, text presentation will take on a new and greater importance. Graduate students and professionals in the media and information sectors, information architecture and human-computer interaction will find this a useful work. The focus on the design framework and its empirical approach make this a unique book.