Web sites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of the content by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. Little is known about users’ abilities to provide such feedback. To guide the development of evaluation tools, this study examines to what extent users with various background characteristics are able to provide useful comments on informational Web sites. Results show that it is important to keep the feedback tools both simple and attractive so that users will be able and willing to provide useful feedback on Web site pages.

Reader feedback is generally considered to be valuable input for writers who want to optimize their documents, but a reader-focused evaluation is often time-consuming. For this reason, we have developed Focus, a software tool for collecting reader comments more efficiently. The design and rationale of the software are described in this article. In a small-scale evaluation study, the results we obtained using Focus were compared to the reader feedback collected under the plus-minus method. It appeared that the number of problems detected per participant did not differ, but there were differences in the types of problems found. Focus participants appeared to comment more from a reviewer's and less from a user's perspective. Although the two methods are not interchangeable, Focus can be said to be a promising evaluation tool, deserving further research.

How have Dutch instructive texts changed in the course of the last century? This question is the topic of a research project presented in this article. First, we give some insight into the kind of documents we have collected in our corpus. The oldest instructive texts date from the beginning of the nineteenth century. But for most technical devices, the tradition of adding an instructive text starts about 1925. After that we present a few results of the investigations: the disappearance of persuasive passages and of realistic representations of human beings. Finally, we give a more detailed sketch of the development of the algorithmic style.