Brown CS PhD Student And Staff Member Shaun Wallace Wins A UserTesting Illumi Award
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 31, 2022
New research co-authored by Shaun Wallace, a Brown CS PhD student and Technical Staff member, has recently won a UserTesting Illumi Award. UserTesting is one of the world's leading human insight platforms. They created the award to inspire the world to think about human insights as a key ingredient for customer experience excellence, product and marketing innovation, and team success.
As an Adobe Research intern, Shaun co-authored "Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals" with Zoya Bylinskii (Adobe), Jon Dobres (Virtual Readability Lab, University of Central Florida), Bernard Kerr (Adobe), Sam Berlow (Typography for Good), Rick Treitman (Adobe), Kathleen Arpin (Riverdale Country School), Dave B Miller (Virtual Readability Lab, University of Central Florida), Jeff Huang (Brown University), and Ben D Sawyer (Virtual Readability Lab, University of Central Florida). This work is published in the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) and will be presented at CHI 2022. Shaun has also co-authored and presented preliminary versions of this research at VSS 2020 and then at CHI 2020.
This line of research is a step toward Shaun's goal of providing everyone with a personalized reading format that allows them to consume information optimally, and its findings reveal that personalizing font choice can help people read four to five extra pages per hour without a loss of comprehension.
To try a five-minute test created by Shaun's team that allows you to find an effective font and/or spacing for yourself, click here.
For an Adobe Research article featuring Shaun and the new field of readability research, click here.
For a three-minute video about the Readability Consortium, founded by Adobe, Google, the University of Central Florida, and Readability Matters to make digital reading and reading comprehension more equitable for all people across the globe, click here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.
