The cost of display switching

Abstract

Attaching a large external display can help a mobile device user view more content at once. This paper reports on a study investigating how different configurations of input and output across displays affect performance, subjective workload and preferences in map, text and photo search tasks. Experimental results show that a hybrid configuration where visual output is distributed across displays is worst or equivalent to worst in all tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best in text and photo search tasks (tied with a mobile-only configuration). After conducting a detailed analysis of the performance differences across different UI configurations, we give recommendations for the design of distributed user interfaces.

The personal cockpit

“…Cauchard et al [38] studied display separation in a mobile environment and found that context switching does not drastically impair performance of a visual search task, provided that head movement is minimized. Rashid et al [171], however, found visual search to be slower when split between a mobile and large display than on either display alone. Spatial constancy in multi-window layouts can improve memorability and reduce switching time [178,201].…”

Enhancing Interaction with Dual-Screen Television Through Display Commonalities

“…Such findings were also observed by Geerts et al [17], who noted that viewers had to manage a good balance between engagement and distraction with the second screen application, and return to some details in the application later (i.e., when the TV material was no longer relevant). Moreover, such scenarios are driven by the effect of visual separation (both angular and depth of field) between the TV and the mobile device, which introduces a switching cost [36] and have shown to inhibit presentation of content across screens [42].…”

The ASPECTA toolkit

“…Middleware systems, frameworks, and APIs have been developed to support the creation of these spaces (e.g., Gaia [44], iRos [18], Sakurai et al's middleware [47] and ZOIL [17]). There are fundamental differences between fragmented MDEs and full coverage displays [37], including effects on the attention transition between displays [38]. Although the toolkit that we present is designed to also support multi-display scenarios, the architecture of both types of systems differs significantly: ASPECTA does not support the distributed use of multiple displays from multiple devices but instead provides access to separate surfaces from a single display as a service to client applications.…”