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Effects of the Chinese Character Size, Page Spacing and Scrolling Frequency on Reading Time of Smartphones

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Design, User Experience, and Usability. Design for Contemporary Interactive Environments (HCII 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12201))

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Abstract

Previous studies found text in small Chinese Characters had better readability than larger ones, and concluded that the behaviors of scrolling text might degrade readability because of length increases of text in large character size. However, they did not manipulate sliding behaviors in the study. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore relations among sliding frequency, reading time, Traditional Chinese character size and page spacing. Results showed that both character sizes and screen sizes affect sliding frequencies. Texts written in 14 pt. characters had more sliding frequencies than 10 pt and 12 pt both which did not significant differ; and the sliding frequencies were the most when using the 0.5H page spacing size, followed by 0.25H and 0H. Besides, the correlation analysis showed no significant correlation between them. It indicated that the sliding frequency might be not a covariate when exploring effects of character size and page spacing on reading time. Finally, the effect of character size and page spacing on reading time was tested. Results showed no significant effects of character size on reading time. The reason might be that the legibility of texts written in these character sizes was high enough because participants could adjust their viewing distances to see them clearly. Besides, the reading time is significantly shorter when using the 0.25H than 0H, while the reading time does not differ significantly between 0.5H and 0H, and between 0.5H and 0.25H. It implied that the display area which is too large or small is harmful for text reading.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan for financially supporting this research under Contract No. MOST-106-2221-E-150-034.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Formosa University, Yunlin, 632, Taiwan

    Shih-Miao Huang

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  1. Shih-Miao Huang
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Correspondence to Shih-Miao Huang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aaron Marcus and Associates, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Aaron Marcus

  2. World Usability Day and Bentley User Experience Center, Newton Center, MA, USA

    Elizabeth Rosenzweig

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Huang, SM. (2020). Effects of the Chinese Character Size, Page Spacing and Scrolling Frequency on Reading Time of Smartphones. In: Marcus, A., Rosenzweig, E. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability. Design for Contemporary Interactive Environments. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12201. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49760-6_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49760-6_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49759-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49760-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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