Does a Split-View Aid Navigation Within Academic Documents?

Reading Habits

Paper is still the dominant medium for reading academic documents [2].

Reasons are:

• Ease of Annotation
• Physical Comfort
• Tangibility
• Portability
• Ease of Navigation
• Better Comprehension

Prior Research Findings

Paper-like navigation provides more flexibility and better support for reading and working with academic documents [1, 6, 7,9].

Pearson et al. [6]:

• Digital version of reading desk
• Mimicked key properties of physical book on a desk

Chen et al. [1]:

• Multiple interconnected devices
• Spread out papers to remove space limitations

Our Investigation

We designed two distinct navigation options on an electronic device.

Provide:

• More paper-like handling
• Better intra-document navigation
• Support hyperlinked navigation without scrolling through the text
• More freedom to layout the text according to the readers needs
• Least possible distraction of reading flow
  

User Study

Qualitative user study / 8 participants (23 - 36ys) Comparison of WebView and SplitView 2 texts / 8 errors
Test

1. Task: Performance

• Read text
• Find errors

2. Task: Preference

• Provide feedback on preferred views
• Suggest improvements

Results

1. Task: Performance

• Participants did not identify many errors
• The faster they read the less errors were found
• The type of view used did not affect performance

Preference:

• SplitView navigation was preferred (7 of 8)
• Only one person (a frequent digital reader) preferred the WebView

Future Work

We designed two distinct navigation options on an electronic device.

Provide:

1. More paper-like handling
2. Better intra-document navigation
3. Support hyperlinked navigation without scrolling through the text
4. More freedom to layout the text according to the readers needs
5. Least possible distraction of reading flow