An empirical study of the influence of the content and structure of documents on the burden on the writer and the utility of the reader

Abstract

It is difficult for the writers to write a document useful to the readers because the writers and the readers have different prior knowledge. In this study, for the purpose of clarifying the technology necessary for appropriate support of document writing, we investigated the burden on the writer and the utility of the reader with a specific focus on the cooking recipes. Our large-scale user-focused experiments revealed that describing the reason behind each cooking process and way to arrange food on a plate with proper headings can improve readability, understandability, and usefulness of readers, without increasing the writers’ burden significantly. Moreover, our experimental results suggested the need for the technology to automatically identify and rearrange the certain types of descriptions within the document.