Reading and searching digital documents: An experimental analysis of the effects of image quality on user performance and perceived effort

As increasing amounts of information are viewed, read and manipulated digitally, many users still report performance and satisfaction costs with digital documents compared to paper equivalents. While many factors impact this process, image quality has been assumed by many to have relatively little impact once current screen display standards are maintained. We test this hypothesis by comparing users on a variety of routine information tasks performed on standard and enhanced screen displays. Using Microsoft ClearType, a font technology which enhances text display resolution by accessing vertical color stripes at the pixel level, we examined user performance on reading, editing and searching tasks with routine office applications. Results suggest that for tasks involving lengthy eye-on-text interaction (e.g., reading for comprehension) advances in image quality can still yield significant improvements in performance for most users.