[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Tom Worthington]

Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 
> ... Maybe some graphic designers can and do take things a little too far.
> But a blanket statement of "reads want to read information" absolutely
> doesn't do it justice. ...

There is considerable research on readability of documents, on paper and
on screen. But the research does not tell us anything which is not 
already in style manuals for printed documents and web design.

What I did find interesting was some research on what it took to make a
web site "credible":

* Fogg, B.J., 2002, Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. A
Research Summary from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford
University:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20080729090848/www.webcredibility.org/guidelines/>.

In other words, apart from layout aiding readability, it helps make the
content credible, which is perhaps as important for a government
document as the actual the content.

This was discussed in "Evaluating Emergency Management Websites using
the 2003 fire as an example", Report by Shelby Canterford, ANU 2003:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20051024000955/http://www.watersprite.com.au/%7Eshelby/emweb/emweb_final_report.pdf>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra