API reference topic study – thoughts

Last month, I published a summary of my dissertation study and I wanted to summarize some of the thoughts that the study results provoked. My first thought was that my experiment was broken. I had four distinctly different versions of each topic yet saw no significant difference between them in the time participants took to determine the relevance of the topic to the task scenario. Based on all the literature about how people read on the web and the importance of headings and in-page navigation cues in web documents, I expected to see at least some difference. But, no.

The other finding that surprised me was the average length of time that participants spent evaluating the topics. Whether the topic was relevant or not, participants reviewed a topic for an average of about 44 seconds before they decided its relevance. This was interesting for several reasons.

  1. In web time, 44 seconds is an eternity–long enough to read the topic completely, if not several times. Farhad Manjoo wrote a great article about how people read Slate articles online, which agrees with the widely-held notion that people don’t read online. However, API reference topics appear to be different than Slate articles and other web content, which is probably a good thing for both audiences.
  2. The average time spend reading a reference topic to determine its relevance in my study was the same whether the topic was relevant to the scenario or not. I would have expected them to be different–the non-relevant topics taking longer than the relevant ones on the assumption that readers would spend more time looking for an answer. But no. They seemed to take about 44 seconds to decide whether the topic would apply or not in both cases.

While, these findings are interesting, and bear further investigation, they point out the importance of readers’ contexts and tasks when considering page content and design. In this case, changing one aspect of a document’s design can improve one metric (e.g. information details and decision speed) at the cost of degrading others (credibility and appearance).

The challenges then become:

  1. Finding ways to understand the audience and their tasks better to know what’s important to them
  2. Finding ways to measure the success of the content in helping accomplishing those tasks

I’m taking a stab at those in the paper I’ll be presenting at the HCII 2015 conference, next month.

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