Page and Scroll screen-presentation prototypes

Design · All designs
Evidence · 6 claims (4 for, 2 mixed) · 1 study (1 causal), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description

Two HyperTalk word-processing prototypes compared in both experiments. The Page prototype displayed the text page-by-page with numbered page icons, so "the position of the visible page relative to whole text was always available to participants". The Scroll prototype reproduced conventional scrolling with arrows but, in Experiment 1, deliberately omitted the scroll box, leaving users without an indication of their location in the text. Both showed the same window size and amount of text.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

• In Experiment 2 the Page prototype required a module that reformatted text after each correction to keep the page-based layout stable

Constraints

• The display window was purposely made small (18 lines of about 50 characters) so a short 574-word document could be used with low processing load

Target Learners

• undergraduate psychology students unfamiliar with word processing

Learning Goals

• reading comprehension and spatial encoding of text
• revising and error correction in written texts

Claims

• Page Presentation Better Sentence Locating [+M]
• Page Revising Coherence Corrections [+M]
• Writers revising in Page mode backtrack more than Scroll writers, with no difference in total revising time [+W]
• The effect of page-break response cues on locating accuracy depends on the presentation mode read: they help Page readers and hurt Scroll readers [~W]
• Page readers tended to include more details in their summaries than Scroll readers (a marginal result, p = .056), while recall of main ideas did not differ significantly [+W]
• Reading time did not differ between Page and Scroll, though Page readers tended to backtrack more [~W]

Related Designs

Examples

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Key Sources

• Annie Piolat, Jean-Yves Roussey and Olivier Thunin. (1997). Effects of screen presentation on text reading and revising. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1997.0145

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	design
id	page-scroll-screen-presentation-prototypes
title	Page and Scroll screen-presentation prototypes
description	Two HyperTalk word-processing prototypes compared in both experiments.
status	review
generated	by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-16
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — annie-piolat-1997

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