Your Text Is Hard to Read: Facilitating Readability Awareness to Support Writing Proficiency in Text Production

Karolus, Jakob ; Feger, Sebastian S. ; Schmidt, Albrecht und Woźniak, Paweł W. (2023): Your Text Is Hard to Read: Facilitating Readability Awareness to Support Writing Proficiency in Text Production. ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) on Rebuilding and Resilience, Pittsburgh, PA USA, July 10 - 14, 2023. Byrne, Daragh; Martelaro, Nikolas; Boucher, Andy; Chatting, David; Alaou, Sarah Fdili; Fox, Sarah; Nicenboim, Iohanna und MacArthur, Cayley (eds.) : In: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 147-160

Abstract

Allowing users of interactive systems to reflect on their task proficiency is often incidental. This is unfortunate, as communicating meaningful task-related proficiency feedback could improve users’ awareness of their abilities and their willingness to improve. To highlight the feasibility of this concept, we evaluated how different methods of readability feedback impacted users during a text production task. In general, our results showed that having access to readability feedback allowed participants to reflect on their task solving approach, facilitating the users’ understanding of their proficiency. Revision-based methods are less distracting for the user than continuous feedback methods, while still offering high efficacy. Further, feedback should be paired with a subtle form of gamification elements. We envision this reflection-oriented design to user proficiency to be applicable to a variety of interactive systems, allowing for an improved and engaging user experience.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Computer Science
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 004 Data processing computer science
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-9893-0
• Place of Publication: New York
• Language: English