Re: Capitalizing...research need
This is the crux of the thing for me. You said:
"If the interaction points are the only ones
bolded, users can just scan the bolded text and
get a very good idea of what to do without even
reading comprehensively."
I can't find any studies that support the idea
that people can or do read this way. That is, I
find no evidence that people can scan bolded text
and extract any kind of summary from it. So I
don't like to undertake any bolding, knowing how
much time it takes, when there's nothing to prove
it helps the readers, or adds any value for them.
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, I'm
just looking for any evidence that it really does
add value.
I don't know of any specific studies, but than I'm relying on memory. I do know that this is one of the concepts I learned when I was getting my degree, in part in one class where we were learning about the phsiology of the eye and how we actually read.
Conceptually, this has been reinforced by research that investigates how people use hypertext, how their eyes tend to be drawn to clearly identified links within larger sections of content.
I'm not sure that just making terms a different font, as someone else mentioned, creates enough of a difference to draw users' eyes; I suppose it depends on the font used.
But here's an experiment to try. Take a printout of a procedure where the UI items that the user would act upon are in bold, the button names, the field names, etc. Run it through a copy machine. Take the copy and run that through the copy machine. Take that copy and run it through the copy machine. Repeat a few more times until the body text is faded and fuzzy enough to be unreadable. Then see if you (or someone else) can figure out what to do by using just the bolded (although probably somewhat fuzzy themselves) terms.
Alternatively (and perhaps easier), if you have the doc source, hide or otherwise cover up all but the bold terms and see if you (or someone else) can figure out what to do.
The thing is, more often when we're using documentation, we're not reading, but scanning. Bolding the key terms that indicate user interaction aids in that scanning.
--
--
Chuck Martin
User Assistance & Experience Engineer
twriter "at" sonic "dot" net www.writeforyou.com
"I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
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This day, we fight!"
- Aragorn
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