Node size: Small is beautiful

An experiment with students at the University of Maryland compared a single text, presented in two ways: as 46 short articles ranging from 4 to 83 lines, and presented as 5 articles of 104 to 150 lines. Readers were asked to answer multiple choice questions during a limited time. The readers of the short articles needed less time to answer more questions correctly than the readers of the longer articles.

In large hyperdocuments cutting the nodes into smaller pieces makes the structure more complicated, thereby also creating browing problems. Therefore, nodes should kept short by using a "compact" language, not by simply cutting up nodes. Writing using fewer words is necessary because of the poor readability of computer screens. In order to compensate for a slow reading speed (up to 30% slower than reading from paper) you should use up to 30% fewer words.