On 06/02/2010 10:01 AM, David Gerard wrote:
FAs are frequently all but unreadable to the casual reader. How
feasible would it be to add "intro clear to casual reader"? I realise some topics are just never going to be that clear ... particularly with the tendency for FAs to be about specialised topics.
And I realise I've just said "hey, let's add another rule!" which is an intrinsically bad thing. So if someone can come up with another idea then that would be really good.
Can we just test the readability to the casual reader? No rules or anything; just make the data available and trust that people will use it wisely.
I could imagine a few different approaches to that:
1. On every page we put a feedback widget. A simple three-clicks-and-done thing, with the option to offer more detail. 2. Randomly sampling readers, where we ask 1 reader in X for their opinion on the article. 3. A separate article evaluation tool, somewhat like fivesecondtest.com. Anybody can nominate a page for evaluation. Volunteer readers are assigned random pages. They give feedback. Maybe, to see if the basic ideas come across, they also summarize what they remember after the page is closed. 4. Something like Mechanical Turk, where we test different versions of the same paragraph or section to see which works better with readers.
All of these have their issues, and I'm sure there are others, but basically I'm saying that we could use our vast traffic and the immense goodwill of our readers to get real data on reader experience.
William