by Amar
Would you like to go Super Size?
Have you ever stood in front of one of those dual-30″ Cinema Display setups in an Apple Store and wondered whether you’d get a stiff neck working with so much screen real-estate? With desktop display sizes growing quickly, and more and more employers recognising that dual-screen setups can increase productivity, it’s actually becoming a valid question whether there’s a limit past which this trend becomes unreasonable. In certain scientific and military applications, visualisations are already big enough to require physically walking from one part of the display to another.
At last week’s CHI ’07 conference, two studies from Virgina Tech were presented that fit into this theme. The first one looked into what would happen to users’ performance if a display was so big that it required walking. They tested both a spatial, map-based visualisation and a more abstract grid-based design, at 2560 × 768, 5120 × 1536 and a whopping 10240 × 3072 pixels (about 2.7m × 1.0m or 9′ × 3.5′). The tasks on the larger displays involved more data, and so would be expected to take longer. But it seems that our ability to process visual information scales quite well: people took on average only about three times as long when the visualisation was sixteen times larger (with variation between tasks).
The second study also tested different display sizes (the largest one being the same as in the other study), but with the aim of comparing physical navigation to its “virtual” counterparts, panning and zooming. With the larger displays, participants tended to rely less on virtual navigation, showing that people do in fact prefer moving around or turning their head. This turned out to be the right choice, as it was also more efficient than panning and zooming.
Putting these results together, it would seem that having a larger display always pays off in terms of cognitive efficiency, navigation efficiency and user preference, even if it’s too big to see all at once. Interestingly, both studies found that spatial visualisations benefit more from the extra screen real-estate than non-spatial ones.
Although efficiency is important, it would also be interesting to see a physical ergonomist’s take on the issue. Do extra-large displays hold new risks of work-related injuries, or is the extra movement actually healthier than our traditionally static workstations?
- Categories: ergonomics, display technologies, visualization, cognition
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12:47
This is strange, I would think that this would be a domain specific problem. For some industries perhaps bigger is always better, but if I as a developer had to walk somewhere to see the other end of my screen I’m pretty sure that my efficiency might degrade a bit. I’d love to see a study about people who are deskbound where the threshold lies. Those 30″ screens just seem like they might be too big.
19:14
In other realms of research like “pure” psychology, when you report on a study like this, you do it in a way that is easily replicable. Then your peers (or often their students) reproduce your study to see if they get the same sort of trends.
In this paper, they seem to be trying to play the “science card” but dont seem to have really done it properly… OK I havent read the paper but I’m inferring it from your report.
Another interesting thought - conferences like CHI are obsessed with novelty. What’s to bet that the researchers who did this paper will drop this topic like a hot cake to work on something else novel, cute or whacky for next year’s conference.
Have we entered the MTV generation of research? Short attention spans and fashion seem to determine what gets published. Discuss.
21:13
disgruntled_pschologist,
My write-up really doesn’t do the papers any justice in terms of representing their study designs. The purpose was more to give a brief summary of the results. Also, the two studies do confirm each others’ findings to some extent: both found efficiency gains from having a larger display area. This had also already been found previously.
I would actually expect HCI to have quite a high standard in terms of experiment design, since its background lies partly in experimental psychology and therefore a lot of psychologists have a hand in the peer review process.
Regarding HCI researchers’ whims: I’ve never really felt that they are such fashion-whores. The ones I’ve met all feel passionate about the particular area they’re interested in, and will spend years and years of their life studying and promoting it. However, since the field is so closely tied to developments in the technology industry, they always have to study the aspects of their interest within the context of a particular, current technology. This may make it appear like they keep changing their topic.
18:51
OK my tone was a bit over the top, but are you saying CHI isn’t obsessed with novelty?
take a look at the procs over the past few years. If you were an academic trying to get published there, you’d understand what I meant. There is lots of very solid research out there that isn’t getting published at confs like chi because its seen as having “been done” and “last years news”. And on the other hand, relatively lightweight stuff that makes a cute hour-long presentation tends to get through. e.g. ethno studies in “new” settings are much more likely to get published. Whacky ubicomp tech that doesnt actually do anything useful tends to get published. And so on….
think about it…
19:44
Working with a 24″ screen at home and a 17″/19″ pair at work, yeah, a 30″ might be too big. Or at least might be getting to the edge of too big.
With larger screen real estate, we have to (a) modify our working methods and (b) develop new interaction models. Simply put, moving your mouse from one corner to the opposite one and targeting an object increases in difficulty as the screen size increases. The eye loses the cursor, the accuracy of the movement drops off, reacquisition of the new location is harder, etc.
Direct action (screen touches) and gestural actions are likely to be much better for these large displays, especially if the user doesn’t have to touch and drag the entire distance. (For example: Touch the object, start to drag, during the drag touch another screen area and release the first, continue the drag — screen object teleportation.)
14:38
The question of how big is too big, while fascinating, hasn’t yet arisen in large instiutional sectors, including health care, education, real estate, and finance. Instead, those cultures are only now beginning to deploy better versions of the pitifully tiny, horribly fuzzy monitors they’ve used for years.
Traders’ desks at hedge funds in mid-town Manhattan might be on the verge of considering how big is too big. But commercial and residential real estate brokers, doctors and nurses and other clinicians, teachers and professors and students, and even architects, all work within budgets that only now are starting to provide reasonably sharp monitors, albeit still too small. It’ll be great fun when they all join the mix of workers who can afford monitors that might, just might, be *too* big for their purposes.
14:03
Hello Amar,
I am new here, just wanted to say hi and this is a great place to visit regularly…keep the good work going on…..I will be checking regularly for updates and news.
13:49
Hi Amar again… are you on break ?