UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Family Medicine and Community HealthEunice Kennedy Shriver Center
Document Type
Conference PaperPublication Date
2016-12-11Keywords
Cognitive EffortMillennials
Plain Text
Fixation Duration
Saccade Amplitude
Cognitive Neuroscience
Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
Musculoskeletal, Neural, and Ocular Physiology
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
While important information is often communicated via text, people read only a small fraction of textual content. Ignoring text is particularly prevalent among Generation Y, who prefer image-based communication and exhibit impatient viewing behavior. One way to improve the effectiveness of text-based communication for younger users is to construct textual information in a way that it can be understood with short glances, a hallmark of Generation Y’s impatient viewing behavior. To test this assertion, we used a set of plain language standards (PLS) to simplify a text passage from an actual website. The results of our eye tracking study showed that PLS were successful in improving textual communication for Generation Y users. The simplified text passage was processed with shorter glances, facilitated a more effective visual search behavior, and improved task performance significantly.Source
Djamasbi, S., Shojaeizadeh, M., Chen, P., & Rochford, J. (2016). Text Simplification and Generation Y: An Eye Tracking Study. SIGHCI 2016 Proceedings, December 11, 2016. Link to publisher website