In some cases, people spent additional time looking for a more recent version of the PDF to check the accuracy of the information. Audit your content and remove old or previous versions of PDFs.
When versions are updated, check to make sure links point to the new version, not the old one. If for some reason an old PDF still needs to live on your site, clearly and legibly state what the most recent version is and where users can find it. Do this on the very first page and throughout the PDF. In addition to the date of the last update, include contact information where users can get help. Offer multiple formats, not just a PDF. Advances in technology have afforded improvements to ereaders, tablets, and mobile reading apps.
While PDFs can be read by most ereaders, offering only a PDF can make your experience seem inconsiderate and outdated. Recent studies for the fourth edition of our intranet-guidelines report and the third edition of our corporate-website report once again found severe usability problems when users were dumped directly into PDF files for online reading. On intranets, employee handbooks, forms, and policies need to be broken down into focused web pages instead of being thrown online as a single blob in PDF format.
In certain cases, including a downloadable PDF might be warranted. In any case, PDF should never be used for on-screen reading. Jakob Nielsen , Ph. Donald A. Norman former VP of research at Apple Computer. Nielsen established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.
He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. She conducted complex user research, service, and experience design for healthcare, agriculture, finance, tourism, retail, and engineering clients. The latest articles about interface usability, website design, and UX research from the Nielsen Norman Group. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter to get notified about future articles. Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating. Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of Usability in the Physical World vs.
Share this article:. For more example titles, go to Wikipedia. Especially in reports, headings and subheadings that stand out in bold typeface flush or close to the left margin and follow a consistent numbering system, exactly as you see in this textbook, help a busy reader quickly locate any specific content they seek.
The drafting process of fleshing out that outline may suggest tweaks to those heading and subheading titles. This is especially useful in larger documents like reports. Font selection is an important consideration because it determines how the audience will receive a document.
Font involves decisions concerning the style of type, size, and even colour. Consider the following:. Writers considering typeface must choose between two major style categories depending on how they would like to accommodate their reader. Serif fonts are ideal for printed documents, especially those with smallish font sizes such as newspapers. Without serifs, sans-serif fonts like Arial the one used in this textbook or Verdana achieve a more clean and modern look, especially on computer screens where serif fonts appear to whither away at the thin part of the stroke and are thus harder to read.
In the appropriate format, all the fonts mentioned above make a document look respectable. Comic Sans , on the other hand, is appropriate for documents aimed at children, but undermines the credibility of any professional document, such as when the unfortunate choice to use it when reporting CERN particle physics discoveries became more newsworthy than the discoveries themselves CBC, Anticipate that audiences might care about font choices, especially if the font clashes with the content like the example above.
To anyone who considers the effects that fonts have on an audience, even going with the Microsoft Word default font of Calibri has its dangers because it comes off looking lazy, being the non-choice of those who never consider the importance of font. At the other extreme, digging around for and using exotic fonts for a document is risky because they can look flakey, such as Papyrus or Copperplate Butterick, Even if they look nice, however, the receiver opening the document on the other end may not have that font in their word processor program, requiring that program to substitute it with another font, which may look worse or mangle layouts arranged around that font.
The safe bet, then, is always to go with familiar, respectable-looking serif or sans serif fonts like those identified at the top of this subsection. In a standard written document, for instance, a point Arial or Times New Roman is the Goldilocks size. Increasing the size much past point has a similar effect as using the Comic Sans font type: it makes your document appear to be targeting an audience of children. Of course, situations where you want to increase the font size abound, such as for titles on title pages so that the eye is drawn immediately to them, and any time readers are required to read at a distance, such as posters on a notice board or presentation slides.
Occasions for going smaller with your font size include footnotes in a report or source credits under images in a document or PowerPoint presentation. In such cases, choosing the right font size becomes a major life decision. Whatever the situation, strike a balance between meeting the needs of the reader to see the text and design considerations.
A choice of colour may also enter into document design considerations, in which case, again, the needs of the reader must be accommodated. Used appropriately, a touch of colour can draw the eye to important text. Likewise, colouring the title of other documents is effective if there are no expectations of doing otherwise some style guidelines forbid colour.
Any use of colour for text must be high-contrast enough to be readable. What kind of document design and formatting can help you most effectively convey the desired message to that audience? You want to use the most effective rhetorical strategies at your disposal; document design is one of those strategies. As you learned in previous writing classes, readers in different contexts expect different textual features, depending on the type of document they are reading and their purpose.
A reader of an online editorial can expect strongly worded arguments that may rely on inflammatory emotional language, but not be backed up with much empirical evidence; we do not expect an online editorial to cite reliable sources in a scholarly format.
In contrast, an academic reader expects the opposite: neutral, unemotional language, and plenty of empirical evidence to logically and validly support claims, with sources cited and documented in an appropriately academic bibliographical formats. These are some of the conventional expectations of the genres. All genres of writing adhere to certain conventions, in terms of content, the style of language used to express that content, and how the content is presented visually.
If you look at an online news article or an article in an actual newspaper , you will often notice consistent formatting features. It is important for writers to understand the conventions of the genre in which they are writing. In many writing contexts, style guides and templates will be available. Style guides dictate the general rules and guidelines that should be followed; templates offer specific content and formatting requirements for specific kinds of documents.
Obviously, all of our clients and all of the evaluators we submit tenders to are all intelligent people, so they are capable of reading, comprehending, recalling and scoring the text from both , but which one would be easier? And which one would be easier when they are tired, or bored, or frustrated? I hope you will agree that the document to the right will definitely be easier for the scanner and the skimmer, and almost certainly also easier for the intensive and extensive reader. Figure 1: Compare a text-heavy document first image to another document that has been formatted with headings, dot points, pull outs, emphasis text and diagrams second image.
The document with enhanced formatting is easier to read, making it easier to comprehensive, recall and assess. Importantly, not all documents should be formatted the same. And sometimes not even all documents to the same client should be formatted the same. The style of formatting of the documents should match the style of the client. If a client is delivering a landmark, iconic project and is using a visionary tone and style, then our formatting should be similarly visionary and exciting.
Whereas if a client is very dry and technical, looking for a straight-forward functional solution, then our formatting should be focussed on communicating technical and functional excellence. Essentially, we need to match the document style to the specific client because what appeals to one client will repel another. And taking this concept one step further, different documents in each tender may call for different formatting. Some documents may be visionary and exciting, such as the executive summary, whereas other documents may be technical and functional, such as management plans.
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