A study with 20 students? This is useless.
Is it more useless than shooting from the hip with completely uninformed opinions?
You could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more noise) pretty easily.
Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
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Re: Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
#12Any guesses as to why this would be so? My guess is that people thought they were reading faster at fewer words per line because there was less effort involved. If it were so, I wonder what it should mean for usability? Should you engineer things so that your users are more effective or so that they believe they are more effective?
Re: Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
#13The results of the study are a bit counter-intuitive for me. I prefer to read and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to read programs with longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading articles and software is to great to expect the same kind of outcome. In any case I don't think 95 cpl is an extreme enough line length to be really interesting. It would have been nice if they had run the study wi…
Compare 95 cpl Times New Roman at 12 pixels to, say, 80 cpl Source Code Pro at 14 pixels. People are more efficient at reading at a certain cpl because the eyes don't get tired (less movement) and it's easier to find the beginning of the next line (maybe I'm the only one who has trouble with that for long lines). Most of these factors depend on the typeface used, the font size, line height, and of course, the distance between your eyes and the medium your reading. When you're talking about code the syntax of the language probably plays some roles in all of this as well (Python is a narrow language, C++ isn't, JavaScript needs lots of indentation, etc.).
Re: Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it more useless than shooting from the hip with completely uninformed opinions?
You could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more noise) pretty easily.
I agree, formatting details seem to be very context-specific and this is a lab setup, not in the wild. I would trust much more some AB test results from the NYT or any media organization - line length is one of the most obvious things to test!
I tested page-widths (which forces line length) on my own site, using n=109k visitors (so, quite a bit larger than n=20): http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux A wide - but not the widest - version performed best.
Re: Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
#15The results of the study are a bit counter-intuitive for me. I prefer to read and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to read programs with longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading articles and software is to great to expect the same kind of outcome. In any case I don't think 95 cpl is an extreme enough line length to be really interesting. It would have been nice if they had run the study wi…
There is such a point. If you have a widescreen monitor, you can verify this by maximizing your browser window and trying to read that article. I tried this. I couldn't take it. I then resized my browser to half the screen width (which in my case is 800 pixels) and was able to read it comfortably. But the comfortable size was still much more than 100 characters per line! (If you count spaces. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to count spaces. But even if you don't count spaces, the first line of the article on my half-screen browser had 102 non-space characters.)
Re: Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it more useless than shooting from the hip with completely uninformed opinions?
With this sample size any reasonably-sounding model you invent on the spot has a good chance of giving better results.
You've implied that 0 data points are better than 20. With 0 data points, consider the source: I will make a "model" to exactly reflect whatever my agenda is, rather than generating one at random.