QuikScan: Facilitating reading and information navigation through innovative document formatting

QuikScan is an innovative document format aimed at facilitating reading and information navigation in documents. It employs multiple within-document summaries formatted as numbered list items to summarize the gist of each section of a document. The presence of the summaries, with a fine level of granularity, enables readers to skim for the superordinate ideas of each section and locate particular items of information quickly and efficiently. This paper focuses on an empirical study of information navigation with QuikScan. Forty participants completed timed information navigating tasks using either a QuikScan or control version of a document with conventional formatting. This study demonstrates intriguing and important findings. Those who read QuikScan were able to locate the superordinate content items significantly faster with a significantly higher accuracy rate. However, QuikScan readers did not perform better on items of lesser importance than those who read the control version.