A
Postdoc
Institute of Design and Visual Interaction
Koen Rummens
With a background in cognitive psychology, I study how the visual properties of information shape our way of processing. My work relies on psychophysics, quantitative experiments, and eye tracking. At the Centre for Visibility Design, my goal is to turn fundamental knowledge on visual processing into better design — helping people read both text and data visualisations more easily.
Visual factors in text and graph reading
Project 1: Real-time word highlighting for text reading
This project uses eye tracking to provide real-time reading support for children — both those developing typically and those with dyslexia. As a reader's eyes land on a word, that word is highlighted, which may improve focus, motivation, and recognition.
Eye tracking is well suited to this kind of support. The technology is becoming increasingly accessible, and because it follows each reader's own idiosyncratic gaze, the help it offers is inherently individual rather than one-size-fits-all. We examined how using gaze data in this way, as reading happens, affects both how well and how comfortably children read.
The results on typical readers can be found here.
Project 2: The effect of color on the perception of bar charts
Colour is almost a default in graph design. Yet how colour affects how we read data visualisations is not fully understood. In this project, I investigated how colour shapes our ability to spot relationships in bar charts.
Specifically, I tested whether highlighting bars in salient red would help readers detect their relationship more easily. We looked at colour used both statically, fixed in place, and dynamically, gradually appearing as the reader engages with the chart.
The results can be found here.
Project 3: Disentangling b, d, p, and q - a 'tail' of minimal letter redesigns
Four of the letters children most often confuse — b, d, p and q — are really just one shape: a line and a circle, flipped or rotated. Unsurprisingly, these letters are a common stumbling block for early readers, and the confusion can linger for readers with dyslexia.
Together with my colleague Isabela Zaine, I test the impact of a small redesign on discriminating between b, d, p, and q. Does adding a single tail to just two letters, d and q makes readers quicker and/or more accurate in discriminating between the four letters?