  Textual documents need to be of good quality to ensure effective asynchronous
communication in remote areas, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, defining a preferred document structure (content and arrangement) for
improving lay readers' decision-making is challenging. First, the types of
useful content for various readers cannot be determined simply by gathering
expert knowledge. Second, methodologies to evaluate the document's usefulness
from the user's perspective have not been established. This study proposed the
experimental framework to identify useful contents of documents by aggregating
lay readers' insights. This study used 200 online recipes as research subjects
and recruited 1,340 amateur cooks as lay readers. The proposed framework
identified six useful contents of recipes. Multi-level modeling then showed
that among the six identified contents, suitable ingredients or notes arranged
with a subheading at the end of each cooking step significantly increased
recipes' usefulness. Our framework contributes to the communication design via
documents.
