5. Ergonomics of multimedia documents

5.1 General considerations

Most recommendations focus on the combination of graphics and text, as these two media are used in almost all technical or didactic documents. Likewise, the focus is on text and graphics, as they are present in most technical documents.

The many studies on illustrated documents converge on the following observation: figures facilitate retention and comprehension of illustrated information, but at the cost of a higher cognitive cost. However, this facilitating effect of illustrated documents can be modulated, or even reversed, by three categories of factors: the type of user, the purpose of the task and the characteristics of the material, all of which can interact. So, the question to ask is not, are multimedia documents effective?...