WallTop: Managing Overflowing Windows on a Large Display

Abstract

With the ever increasing amount of digital information, users desire more screen real estate to process daily desktop computing work, and might well benefit from using a large high-resolution display for information management. Unfortunately, we know very little about users' behaviors when using such a display for daily computing, and current user interfaces are mainly designed for normal-sized desktop monitors, which might not well suit a large display. In this article, we first present a longitudinal study that investigates how users manage overflowing digital information on a wall-sized display in a personal desktop computing context by comparing it with single and dual desktop monitors. Results showed users' unanimous preferences of working on a large display and revealed large-display users' unique activity patterns of managing windows. Guided by the study results, we designed a set of interaction techniques that provide greater flexibility in managing multiple windows. They include facile methods for selecting, moving, and resizing multiple windows using an active window boundary called Fringe, rearranging selected windows using multi-and single-window marking menus, packing/unpacking the selected windows using easily activated icons, and freely adjusting the order of overlapping windows with a Jab-to-Lift operation. We coherently integrated these techniques with traditional operations in a large-display window management prototype called WallTop. Two rounds of usability testing showed that users can quickly and easily learn the new interaction techniques and apply them to realistic window management tasks on a large display with increased efficiency.Xiaojun Bi (xjunbi@gmail.com) is a computer science researcher with an interest in human-computer interaction; he is now at Google. Seok-Hyung Bae

A Generic Framework and Library for Exploration of Small Multiples through Interactive Piling

“…Another interaction technique for spatially organized items, called Bubble Clusters [50], is built on the implicit formation of groups based on their spatial proximity. Wall-Top [8] implements a similar approach, where overlapping windows feature an outline that allows for group-based spatial positioning via drag-and-drop. We analyzed this work to identify common gestures for interaction, which we implemented in PILING.JS.…”

A Generic Framework and Library for Exploration of Small Multiples through Interactive Piling

“…Another interaction technique for spatially organized items, called Bubble Clusters [49], is built on the implicit formation of groups based on their spatial proximity. Wall-Top [8] implements a similar approach, where overlapping windows feature an outline that allows for group-based spatial positioning via drag-and-drop. We analyzed this work to identify common gestures for interaction, which we implemented in PILING.JS.…”

Use of Large Multi-Touch Interfaces

“…Also, they reported that users work significantly faster on larger displays while completing multiple step cognitively loaded tasks. Using a large display provides benefits for managing multiple windows by showing on display simultaneously (Bi, Bae, & Balakrishnan, 2014). Besides, working on large display enhances the concentration of the users on the task.…”

“…According to Bi et al (2014), VLDs might be beneficial about ergonomic issues. For example, users are limited to move their heads or to change their sitting position in front of the single monitor usage.…”