Improving selection of off-screen targets with hopping

ABSTRACT

Many systems provide the user with a limited viewport of a larger graphical workspace. In these systems, the user often needs to find and select targets that are in the workspace, but not visible in the current view. Standard methods for navigating to the off-screen targets include scrolling, panning, and zooming; however, these are laborious when users cannot see a target's direction or distance. Techniques such as halos can provide awareness of targets, but actually getting to the target is still slow with standard navigation. To improve off-screen target selection, we developed a new technique called hop, which combines halos with a teleportation mechanism that shows proxies of distant objects. Hop provides both awareness of off-screen targets and fast navigation to the target context. A study showed that users are significantly faster at selecting off-screen targets with hopping than with two-level zooming or grab-and-drag panning, and it is clear that hop will be faster than either halos or proxy-based techniques (like drag-and-pop or vacuum filtering) by themselves. Hop both improves on halo-based navigation and extends the value of proxies to small-screen environments.

REFERENCES

• 1: Patrick Baudisch , Ruth Rosenholtz, Halo: a technique for visualizing off-screen objects, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642695]
• 2: Baudisch, P., Cutrell, E., Robbins, D., Czerwinski, M., Tandler, P., Bederson, B., and Zierlinger, A. (2003). Drag-and-pop and drag-and-pick: techniques for accessing remote screen content on touch- and pen-operated systems. Proc. Interact'03, 57--64.
• 3: Patrick Baudisch , Nathaniel Good , Victoria Bellotti , Pamela Schraedley, Keeping things in context: a comparative evaluation of focus plus context screens, overviews, and zooming, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503423]
• 4: Patrick Baudisch , Xing Xie , Chong Wang , Wei-Ying Ma, Collapse-to-zoom: viewing web pages on small screen devices by interactively removing irrelevant content, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029647]
• 5: Benjamin B. Bederson , James D. Hollan, Pad++: a zooming graphical interface for exploring alternate interface physics, Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.17-26, November 02-04, 1994, Marina del Rey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/192426.192435]
• 6: Anastasia Bezerianos , Ravin Balakrishnan, The vacuum: facilitating the manipulation of distant objects, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1055023]
• 7: Staffan Björk, Hierarchical flip zooming: enabling parallel exploration of hierarchical visualizations, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, p.232-237, May 2000, Palermo, Italy [doi>10.1145/345513.345324]
• 8: Staffan Björk , Lars Erik Holmquist , Johan Redström , Ivan Bretan , Rolf Danielsson , Jussi Karlgren , Kristofer Franzén, WEST: a Web browser for small terminals, Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.187-196, November 07-10, 1999, Asheville, North Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/320719.322601]
• 9: Cockburn, A. and Savage, J. (2003). Comparing Speed-Dependent Automatic Zooming with Traditional Scroll, Pan and Zoom Methods. Proc. CHI'03, 87--102.
• 10: Carl Gutwin, Improving focus targeting in interactive fisheye views, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503424]
• 11: Carl Gutwin , Chris Fedak, Interacting with big interfaces on small screens: a comparison of fisheye, zoom, and panning techniques, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Graphics interface, p.145-152, May 17-19, 2004, London, Ontario, Canada
• 12: Ken Hinckley , Edward Cutrell , Steve Bathiche , Tim Muss, Quantitative analysis of scrolling techniques, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503389]
• 13: Kasper Hornbæk , Erik Frøkjær, Reading of electronic documents: the usability of linear, fisheye, and overview+detail interfaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.293-300, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365118]
• 14: Takeo Igarashi , Ken Hinckley, Speed-dependent automatic zooming for browsing large documents, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.139-148, November 06-08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States [doi>10.1145/354401.354435]
• 15: Jeff A. Johnson, A comparison of user interfaces for panning on a touch-controlled display, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.218-225, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223932]
• 16: Victor Kaptelinin, A comparison of four navigation techniques in a 2D browsing task, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems, p.282-283, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223355.223675]
• 17: Azam Khan , George Fitzmaurice , Don Almeida , Nicolas Burtnyk , Gordon Kurtenbach, A remote control interface for large displays, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029655]
• 18: Heidi Lam , Patrick Baudisch, Summary thumbnails: readable overviews for small screen web browsers, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1055066]
• 19: Tomer Moscovich , John F. Hughes, Navigating documents with the virtual scroll ring, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029642]
• 20: Kenton O'Hara , Abigail Sellen, A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.335-342, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258787]
• 21: Daniel C. Robbins , Edward Cutrell , Raman Sarin , Eric Horvitz, ZoneZoom: map navigation for smartphones with recursive view segmentation, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 25-28, 2004, Gallipoli, Italy [doi>10.1145/989863.989901]
• 22: Manojit Sarkar , Marc H. Brown, Graphical fisheye views of graphs, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.83-91, May 03-07, 1992, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/142750.142763]
• 23: Amy Skopik , Carl Gutwin, Improving revisitation in fisheye views with visit wear, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1055079]
• 24: Randall B. Smith , Ranald Hixon , Bernard Horan, Supporting flexible roles in a shared space, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.197-206, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289494]
• 25: G. M. Smith , m. c. schraefel, The radial scroll tool: scrolling support for stylus- or touch-based document navigation, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029641]
• 26: Desney S. Tan , Brian Meyers , Mary Czerwinski, WinCuts: manipulating arbitrary window regions for more effective use of screen space, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.986106]
• 27: Polle T. Zellweger , Jock D. Mackinlay , Lance Good , Mark Stefik , Patrick Baudisch, City lights: contextual views in minimal space, CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/765891.766022]
• 28: Shumin Zhai , Barton A. Smith , Ted Selker, Improving Browsing Performance: A study of four input devices for scrolling and pointing tasks, Proceedings of the IFIP TC13 Interantional Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, p.286-293, July 14-18, 1997

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Keywords:
drag-and-pop, graphical workspaces, halo, navigation, off-screen targets, proxy targets, vacuum filtering