Dealing with "Walls of text" and PDF documents

Question

I'm working on a piece for a financial institution in the US - im just wondering if there is a better way to display walls of text. The app itself has maybe about 7 instances of T&Cs of all kinds, including one federal act that is 50 pages. Do you any of you UX professionals have any solutions to this?

To give you some background, the original app was designed about 3 years ago and Im just wondering if laws with with displaying these kinds of documents have changed or if you can point me to a reference. Or even a solution.

We thought about having a kind of an agree and email me the document etc.

Answer 1

Three things first but many more to come, depending on your requirements.

• Cluster your text. Divide the text in to digestible chunks. You could extract the gist out of one page / paragraph (like this) and use it as a preview. Then link that preview to the complete content of that page / paragraph.

• Provide search options. Linguee for example shows the context of the search. They also mark the search term within the search result darker, if the term is related stronger to the text.

• Paginate, separate and group your content in a manner, so the user is able to skim through categories easily.

I don't know what the law conditions are so I would also provide a link to the standard T&Cs sheets as many services providers do.