The overwhelming success of our recent webinar, Getting Compliance Documentation Under Control, suggest that many of you are trying to get your compliance documentation in order. When organizations fail to meet regulatory requirements, bad documentation is often to blame. Policies and procedures that are unclear, confusing, inconsistent, or out-of-date can lead to mistakes, increased compliance risk, reduced quality, low productivity, and failed audits.

About the Study
The study compared an original version of a 5-page health education text with 23 headings to 3 alternate versions: one with no headings and two with 44 and 41 headings respectively. The Information Mapping method (IMAP) was used to create the versions with more headings, as IMAP was "the only method known to the authors which (among other things) offers very strict and explicit guidelines on how information should be segmented and labeled with headings." The first IMAP version re-ordered the information and the second version kept the original order.

Headings Increase Search Speed
While the study did not find any significant difference in search speed among the three versions with headings, it did reconfirm that "participants’ search times with the texts that contained headings were shorter than with the text that had no headings." The researchers observed that this finding is "in line with other research into the effects of headings on search speed," and that it "strengthens the notion of headings as effective ‘signals’ of textual content." The number of headings was not found to make a significant difference in this short example, although the researchers commented that different results might be found were a similar study to be done on longer health education texts which could require participants to use a different search strategy. In this study participants simply scanned through the information to find what they needed and did not make use of tables of contents and other access aids provided. This search approach would not be feasible for a much longer document.

Participants Prefer Information Mapping
The study also found that the participants preferred the layout of the reordered IMAP version of the text over all 3 other versions on several subjective evaluations. In fact, "this was the only version evaluated more positively than the no-headings text." The researchers conclude that "depending on the experience of readers this specific kind of explicit structuring may have advantageous effects. With everything else being equal, this may incline health education designers to opt for many headings and relatively high segmentation of text."

Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to test the effect of the frequency of headings and order on information retrieval times. It did not compare the quality and readability of the original text to the other versions, nor, as the researchers point out, did it measure the participants’ understanding of the information. Additional information and research could help provide a better understanding of these findings and how they can be used to improve the effectiveness of health education texts.

Reference
The study, originally published online Jul 3, 2008, is titled "The effects of headings in information mapping on search speed and evaluation of a brief health education text" and is available online at http://jis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/833 or in the Journal of Information Science 2008; 34; 833.

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