Usable Documents Help People Make Better Investment Choices: Linking Interpretive and Post-Interpretive Processing Stages in an Eye-Tracking and Decision-Task Study

One influential psycholinguistic model distinguishes between an interpretive stage, in which sentence meaning is computed, and a post-interpretive stage, in which that meaning guides decisions or actions. We define ‘usability’ as the extent to which a written document supports an efficient transition between these stages. We assess usability in mandatory pre-investment disclosures (KIDs) by examining attentional allocation during reading and the conversion of interpreted information into an investment decision. Seventy-nine Italian adults varying in age, expertise, and literacy adopted a client profile, read three KID sections, and decided whether to invest an amount of money; half read the original disclosures and half read the redesigned, usability-enhanced versions. Eye-tracking indexed interpretive processing, while a decision task captured post-interpretive performance. Results showed that usable documents increased attention to written text over numerical entries and led to evaluations that better reflected participants’ risk tolerance, monetary needs, and investment horizon. Theoretically, although the two processing stages rely on distinct resource pools, reduced interpretive effort through wording and layout improvements was associated with better post-interpretive performance, suggesting that lower processing demands during interpretation may free resources for subsequent short-memory-based decision-making. Keywords: Usability, eye-tracking, financial decision making, interpretive and post-interpretive processing