Usability of Paper – An Observation
Recently, on the Usability SIG mailing list, the usability of paper forms, and subsequently, usability issues of paper have been discussed. The starting point was an article by Caroline Jarrett who discussed “Why People persist with using Paper Forms“. That discussion came to my mind when I recently got hold of an encyclopedia.
Amongst other things, “accessibility†is one reason why people stick with paper. It’s easy flipping through pages and annotating stuff. When I flipped through the pages of that particular encyclopedia, however, I noticed that the page numbers had been placed very inconveniently. For knowing what page I was on, the book had to be almost fully opened so that I could see the page numbers. This made it impossible to quickly “jump†to page 263 by accessing the pages in a “flip-book†fashion.
So: yes, paper can be very “accessibleâ€Â, but (unfortunately) it is possible to make access to information in books harder, e.g. by placing page numbers in the “wrong†places. It should thus not be assumed, that the usability of paper is a given – one should still invest some thought in how to present information in that medium.
