Twenty years after the general adoption of overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor, modern window systems differ mainly in minor details such as window decorations or mouse and keyboard bindings. While a number of innovative window management techniques have been proposed, few of them have been evaluated and fewer have made their way into real systems. We believe that one reason for this is that most of the proposed techniques have been designed using a low fidelity approach and were never made properly available. In this paper, we present Metisse, a fully functional window system specifically created to facilitate the design, the implementation and the evaluation of innovative window management techniques. We describe the architecture of the system, some of its implementation details and present several examples that illustrate its potential.

Casual piling of paper-based media during traditional tabletop collaboration is an important practice that helps coordinate task and group interactions. Previous research has shown that the ability to move piles around on a table plays a critical role in accessing and sharing task resources. However, existing casual storage techniques for digital workspaces only provide access to stored items at the periphery of the workspace, potentially compromising collaborative interactions at a digital tabletop display. To address this issue, we introduce storage bins, a mobile storage mechanism that enables access to stored items anywhere in the workspace. We also present an exploratory user study involving the use of mobile and peripheral storage mechanisms on a large, hi-resolution collaborative tabletop display. Findings from this study demonstrate the utility of storage bins and further our understanding of the impact of mobile and peripheral storage mechanisms on collaboration at a tabletop display.

Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore peripheral display techniques that improve multitasking efficiency by helping users maintain task flow, know when to resume tasks, and more easily reacquire tasks. Specifically, we compare two types of abstraction that provide different task information: semantic content extraction, which displays only the most relevant content in a window, and change detection, which signals when a change has occurred in a window (all designed as modifications to Scalable Fabric [17]). Results from our user study suggest that semantic content extraction improves multitasking performance more so than either change detection or our base case of scaling. Results also show that semantic content extraction provides significant benefits to task flow, resumption timing, and reacquisition. We discuss the implication of these findings on the design of peripheral interfaces that support multitasking. Author Keywords: Information visualization, peripheral displays, abstraction, multitasking

Research has shown that computers are notoriously bad at supporting the management of parallel activities and interruptions, and that mobility increases the severity and scope of these problems. This paper presents activity-based computing (ABC) which supplements the prevalent data- and application-oriented computing paradigm with technologies for handling multiple, parallel and mobile work activities. We present the design and implementation of ABC support embedded in the Windows XP operating system. This includes replacing the Windows Taskbar with an Activity Bar, support for handling Windows applications, a zoomable user interface, and support for moving activities across different computers. We report an evaluation of this Windows XP ABC system which is based on a multi-method approach, where perceived ease-of-use and usefulness was evaluated together with rich interview material. This evaluation showed that users found the ABC XP extension easy to use and likely to be useful in their own work.

Copy-and-paste, one of the fundamental operations of modern user interfaces, can be performed through various means (e.g. using the keyboard, mouse-based direct manipulation or menus). When users copy and paste between two different windows, the process is complicated by window management tasks. In this paper, we propose two new window management techniques to facilitate these tasks in the particular case of partially overlapping windows. We describe an experiment comparing four commonly used copy-andpaste techniques under four window management conditions – non-overlapping windows, partially overlapping windows, and partially overlapping ones with one of our two window management techniques. Results show that our new window management techniques significantly reduce task completion time for all copy-and-paste techniques. They also show that X Window copy-and-paste is faster than the other three techniques under all four window management conditions.

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Tara Matthews is a computer scientist with interests in peripheral displays, glanceability, evaluation, multitasking, accessibility, and ubiquitous computing; she is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Tye Rattenbury is a computer scientist with an interest in models of human behavior, particularly in applications of these models in work support systems; he is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Scott Carter is a computer scientist with interests in ubiquitous computing, peripheral displays, accessibility, and social media; he is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley.- 2-Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to balance multiple activities. However, peripheral display innovation and development has suffered because much of the past work has been technology-driven: there exists little theoretical understanding of how they operate in relation to people’s everyday lives. In response to this, we present a framework for understanding, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays based on Activity Theory. We argue that peripheral displays are

As large displays become more affordable, researchers are investigating the effects on productivity, and techniques for making the large display user experience more effective. Recent work has demonstrated significant productivity benefits, but has also identified numerous usability issues that inhibit productivity. Studies show that larger displays enable users to create and manage many more windows, as well as to engage in more complex multitasking behavior. In this paper, we describe various usability issues, including losing track of the cursor, accessing windows and icons at a distance, dealing with bezels in multimonitor displays, window management, and task management. We also present several novel techniques that address these issues and make users more productive on large display systems.

Abstract. Most existing graphical user interfaces are usually designed for a fixed context of use, thus making them rather difficult to modify for other contexts of use, such as for other users, other platforms, and other environments. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a new visual design method for graphical users interfaces referred to as “visual design by (de)composition”. In this method, any individual or composite component of a graphical user interface is submitted to a series of operations for composing a new interface from existing components and for decomposing an existing one into smaller pieces that can be used in turn for another interface. For this purpose, any component of a user interface is described by specifications that are consistently written in a user interface description language that remains hidden to the designers ’ eyes. We first define the composition and decomposition operations and individually exemplify them on some small examples. We then demonstrate how they can be used to visually design new interfaces for a real-world case study where variations of the context of use induce frequent recomposition of user interfaces. Finally, we describe how the operations are implemented in a dedicated interface builder supporting the aforementioned method. 1

The term Distributed Display Environment (DDE) compactly describes computer systems that present output to more than one physical display. Often DDEs allow attached input devices to treat the displays as a contiguous surface but this is not necessarily a requirement. In much previous HCI research, there are implicit or explicit assumptions that a computer system has at most one physical display attached. However, very recent research has recognized that a computer system can have