Your Text Is Hard to Read: Facilitating Readability Awareness to Support Writing Proficiency in Text Production

Paper in proceeding, 2023

Allowing users of interactive systems to refect on their task profciency is often incidental. This is unfortunate, as communicating meaningful task-related profciency feedback could improve users' awareness of their abilities and their willingness to improve. To highlight the feasibility of this concept, we evaluated how diferent methods of readability feedback impacted users during a text production task. In general, our results showed that having access to readability feedback allowed participants to refect on their task solving approach, facilitating the users' understanding of their profciency. Revision-based methods are less distracting for the user than continuous feedback methods, while still ofering high efcacy. Further, feedback should be paired with a subtle form of gamifcation elements. We envision this refection-oriented design to user profciency to be applicable to a variety of interactive systems, allowing for an improved and engaging user experience.