(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003)
Hutchings, Dugald Ralph; Stasko, John T.
There are a number of challenges for researchers in the area of window and screen space management: (1) many systems have been proposed, but little study on people's window interaction habits exists, (2) users of emerging display systems have different properties and needs than users of single-display systems, yet users might also interact with several different types of systems, and (3) evaluation is difficult since habits are unknown but more importantly there are two very different roles that managers must fulfill: allow the user to complete one task through the aid of several windows and be able to switch to or monitor a different task. To begin to answer these challenges, we present a interview-based study of window system users that investigates the way they manage screen space. Results include the characteristics common across all users as well as a classification of management styles. We also present some implications for building and evaluating window and display space management systems.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002)
Hutchings, Dugald Ralph; Stasko, John T.
We present a set of new operations for managing screen real estate that allow windows to acquire more desktop space. This set of operations obeys the following guidelines: (1) the visible information contents of each window are preserved (i.e., operations never result in covering already-exposed window contents), (2) operation invocation requires only simple user action, and (3) windows grow and move in a natural and easily understandable manner, mimicking the interactions of colliding physical objects. We call the main operations expand and shove. Expand and shove represent two endpoints on a space-acquisition scale, and we give other possible operations called jostle and ram that fall between these two points. Additional concepts of undo (to allow windows to revert to earlier sizes and positions) and relevant regions (to allow more tightly controlled window information regions to be indicated) are also introduced. To theoretically support the methods used by the operations, we present a classification of the possible ways that pairs of windows can initially overlap and subsequently interact during the operations.