Titin.net

Computerization of documents changes reader’s relevance judgment behavior drastically. Bochanan and Loizides (2007) conducted a study where they assessed the behavior and outcome of document relevance judgment of 30 participants that were divided equally into three categories. Within each category, participants were asked to assess the relevance of the same 20 scholarly documents to a given topic. The three categories were as follows:

1. Given the documents in paper form

2. Documents given as PDF documents

3. One page summary of documents in PDF format. These participants were allowed to download the full document if the desired to.

Although the first two categories relevance score was higher (63%) than the third category (57%), the difference was not statistically significant. Yet, the behavior of assessing these documents was quite different between these three categories. Probably the most striking is that within the digital categories, participants spent most of their time on the first page (64%) and 34% did not even scroll down the first page! When comparing the second group (Full PDF document group) with paper group, this group spent more time scrolling (15%) and less time stationary reading (17%) compared to the paper group (<5% and 50% respectively)!

This study shows that computers’ affordances does not guarantee use. The presence of scrolling, document download, and page flipping did not lead to their use by the participants. We need to understand human’s psychology. And, then design better computer affordances.

Buchanan, G. & Loizides, F., 2007. Investigating Document Triage on Paper and Electronic Media. In Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 11th European Conference, ECDL 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 16-21, 2007, Proceedings. Springer-Verlag New York Inc, p. 416.