Multiple Windows Strategies
Window Components
- Titles
- Borders or frames
- Scroll bars
- Buttons or icons
Windows Actions
- Open
- Open, place, and size
- Close
- Resizing
- Move
- Bring forward or activate
Challenges of Multiple Windows Design
- Multiple monitors
- Rapid display flipping
- Split screens
- Fixed size, space filling, tiled
- Variable size, space filling, tiled
- Variable size, non-space filling, tiled
- Piles of tiles
- Automatic panning
- Window zooming
- Arbitrary overlaps
- Cascades
Coordination of Multiple Windows Tasks
- Synchronized scrolling
- Hierarchical browsing
- Direct selection
- Two dimensional browsing
- Dependent windows opening
- Dependent windows closing
- Save or open windows state
Image Browsing in Tightly Coupled Windows
- Vertical and horizontal scroll bars only work for images 3 to 5 times screen size
- Zoom-in and Zoom-out techniques work better on larger images
- Keep overview on screen with enlarged subsection
- Zoom and replace (easy to implement, sometimes users find it disorienting)
- Fisheye view nice alternative to zoom and replace
Design of browsers should be governed by user's task
- Image generation
- Open-ended exploration
- Diagnosis
- Navigation
- Monitoring
Personal Role Management (PRM)
- Role-centered design
- emphasizes user's tasks rather than documents
- Docucentric design
- focus on user's document
PRM Requirements
- Support for unified framework
- Provide visual, spatial layout that matches task
- Support multiple information access for fast rearrangement of information
- Allow fast switching and resumption among roles
- Free user's cognitive resources to work on task-domain actions
- Use screen space efficiently and productively for tasks
PRM Task Objects
- Vision statement
- Set of people
- Task hierarchy
- Schedule