QnDReview

Abstract

In 2013, 392 research papers and notes were published in the CHI conference (The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) and even more papers in the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are constantly published in various conferences and journals. It is quite arduous, if not impossible, to read all of these papers. One approach to deal with this information deluge is to focus on skimming through lots of papers in a short period of time, so that one can more wisely choose what to read before investing time in them. In order to teach such a skimming technique, I have taught a technique, called "Quick and Dirty Review (QnDReview)," in a graduate-level HCI course. The method has been employed in the course for five semesters, and students' responses were collected and analyzed. Results showed that students spent, on average, 4.3 minutes per paper and believed that they got the gist of each paper. However, the largest benefit I noticed is that students get the overall pictures of the fields while exposing themselves to various new ideas through this approach.