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