Does Font Size Matter?
Devices with Small Screen Interfaces (SSI), such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), are in great demand due to their small size and their many functions. One important drawback, however, is the limited amount of real estate that can be devoted to the presentation of text. When considering this limitation, questions arise as to the best way to present electronic text so that both the quality of the reading experience and user preference is optimized. One way that might optimize reading performance is to use a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) format for the presentation of text. As the name suggests, RSVP serially presents text one word at a time in the same area of a screen. This type of format has been found to produce generally positive results. For example, a study which compared the RSVP method to a sentence-by-sentence format, as well as a more traditional page-like format found each method to be equally efficient in terms of reading comprehension (Rahman & Muter, 1999).
