Chunking?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

David Girardot, responding to the recommendation that we should make smaller
"chunks" for screen reading than for printing, observed: <<I'm not sure I
agree with this suggestion.  When I read something online, I _hate_ it when
the author has chunked it up and I have to use extra clicks and mouse
movements to read the whole article. The scroll-bar lets me conveniently
chunk things up as much as I want; just organize things with headings and
paragraphs and I'll be fine.>>

I think you (or the original poster, not sure whom) may be confusing white
space with conciseness. There's a general rule of thumb that readers are
less willing to read long paragraphs of text onscreen than on the printed
page--at least in the context of documentation and online help, as opposed
to (say) e-books. I have considerable sympathy for this notion, though I've
yet to see a good study that definitively proves this to be the case.

That being said, conciseness in online text is a virtue we should practice
more. If you chunk information appropriately so that each paragraph deals
with single topics, expressed as concisely as you can without losing
important content or context, the result will inevitably be shorter
paragraphs. Depending on how you've designed the material, this can lead to
more scrolling because of the accumulation of between-paragraph spacing--but
it can also lead to less scrolling because more paragraphs fit on a single
screen. Which happens to be the case is going to depend strongly on your
actual design.

If memory serves, one of the things Jared Spool et al. have found is that
readers are willing to scroll once they've found the topic they're looking
for and are actually reading useful information, but less willing to scroll
if they're just trying to find out if they've got the right topic in the
first place (skimming). As you note, proper use of headings make this
skimming far less painful. But I try to avoid the skimming process in the
first place by including a miniature hyperlinked table of contents (TOC) in
any topic that runs more than a couple screens with several subheads. This
approach lets readers identify within the first screen (by skimming the TOC)
whether they've arrived at the correct topic; if so, they can click an entry
in the TOC to take them immediately to the subtopic they're actually
seeking, with little or no scrolling. If not, back to the previous screen
and try again!

The disadvantage of this approach, of course, is that they can end up in
midtopic without knowing precisely how they got there. I rationalize this as
an acceptable tradeoff, since clicking the Back button gets them right back
to the top of the topic with no fuss or bother. No complaints thus far!

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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