A self-paced approach to hypermedia design for patient education

Traditional theories on multimedia design have considered the importance of modality effect to a large extent. The stress on modality effect has often de-emphasized the importance of what information architecture can do to control modality effect if information presentation is self-paced instead of system paced. We have considered a patient education module as our case study. I propose a conversational interactive patient education module as a solution which responds to individual reader needs during hypermedia interaction. In this article, I take an initial step towards this approach, testing patient education modules with and without narration to support text and static graphics. Our results suggest that levels of reader comprehension and accuracy for modules with and without narration have similar performance. Readers have shown a preference towards using narration, online text and graphics based on individual task, if the system permits a self-paced interaction. Thus, we argue that modality effect may be influenced with a self-paced system.