# Analysis of Skim Reading on Desktop versus Mobile Screen
## 1 Introduction  
The presence or absence of keywords allows readers to decide whether a document is important to a user's query. Skim reading allows the reader to unleash that information from the text [1]. The goal of skim reading is to remember the topical facts from the text [2] and its effectiveness is measured by testing recognition memory and inferences about sentences in the text, according to whether people have skimmed it or fully read half of the given text, which can be explained as reading a portion of a text from the whole text [3]. This research aims to observe the difference in skim reading on varying screen resolutions such as comparing the amount of information gathered by a group of people when they read the text using a mobile screen or a desktop screen. The sizes of both the devices vary and it might affect the reading pattern of the readers; the readers might feel comfortable when reading from a laptop screen that is larger than a mobile phone screen [4]. This experimental study has been carried out to analyze whether the quality of skimming is better either when people read the text from a laptop screen or when they do it on a mobile screen. The study aims to evaluate the findings using a skim-reading strategy called Satisficing [3] which states that the readers continue to read the text until they achieve the target information, which they expect to learn from the text. Consequently, linear reading is achieved. When a user's satisficing falls below a certain threshold, he or she will move on to the next section of the text [5]. Readers usually maintain an understanding of the text. They do not aim for high text quality; rather, they want to achieve the goals of learning from a good text [6].  
There is a huge volume of information available online, on the internet, and therefore, it has become our sheer need to devise methods for a clear understanding of the content. One of the skills that are of importance when reading on a screen is skimming. Skimming when applied to a text gives useful results. It is a simple skill that defines how to read to obtain a general understanding of the text and suggests creating samples to jump from one part of the text to another [7]. People frequently skim-read due to a lack of time which includes skipping words or whole pages or paragraphs that seem unimportant to save significant amount of time and effort by focusing on the important part of the text. Due to the abundance of knowledge available on the World Wide Web (WWW), the text on these pages is often skimmed rather than being read in-depth [8]. A software prototype is developed in this research study to analyze the impact of skim reading on a desktop computer screen versus a mobile device screen. The latter screen due to small in size usually provides text content into large page, which requires scrolling. However, the former screen may not necessarily need scrolling.  
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reports related studies, Section 3 describes the background of reading strategies, Section 4 discusses the impact of technology on readers, especially skim readers. The experiments carried out for the under-discussion study have been presented in Section 5; while Section 6 describes how the experiments were carried out using certain user interfaces. and Section 7 presents results. Section 8 explores discussion and limitations, and finally, Section 9 provides conclusions and future directions.