Anticipating reader problems: cognitive shortcuts that prevent experts from focusing on readers

摘要

Why is it so hard, even for professional writers, to prevent reader problems from occurring in documents? In this paper, we focus on one crucial aspect of the anticipation process: the assessment of problem detections. We report on an exploratory study in which experts had to judge and motivate the likelihood and severity of a set of reader problems. Based on this study, we present six cognitive shortcuts we distinguished that may bother experts in their attempts to focus on readers.