Designing for selective reading with QuikScan views

Many people--especially knowledge workers--experience information overload, lack sufficient time to read, and therefore choose to read selectively within texts. QuikScan Views is a new Web-based reading environment that provides extensive support for selective reading. It is an enhancement of QuikScan, an empirically validated document format that employs a multiple summary approach to facilitate selective reading, enable quick access to specific ideas in the body of the document, and improve text recall. QuikScan Views provides a hyperlinked table of contents for global navigation, displays QuikScan summaries in a scrolling window (as well as within the body of the document), and adds an extra level of summarization by means of a hyperlinked structured abstract. A QuikScan Views document gives the reader choices of pathways through the document corresponding to the time the reader wishes to invest and the reader's desire to increase their recall of the document.