Animated Dynamic Highlighting for Reading

The recent years have seen an exponential increase in the amount of information available through the Internet on any given topic. Information retrieval techniques have been steadily improving and can provide a mass of relevant re- sults, but those results still have to be processed and di- gested by a human reader. Computer displays of traditional documents often simply model the way a paper rendition of the document would work. But more effective display techniques may be possible by exploiting the dynamic dis- play properties of the computer screen. In this paper, we describe a system called Animated Dynamic Highlighting (ADH), which has been added to the ReadUp reader, part of the UpLib personal digital library system. It is an inter- active, user-controlled technique that enhances the presen- tational aspects of the reading task. We ran a pilot study to get an initial impression of user acceptance of active display techniques, comparing ADH to two other display techniques. The results of the study are discussed here.