Single Large vs Multiple Displays

Xiaojun Bi, Ravin Balakrishnan, University of Toronto

Summary

This is a comparison study between large display vs single/dual monitor use. It provides an insight to design of interaction techniques on a large display system.

Details

Display sizes and numbers have been steadily growing over the last decade. Yet current displays cover 10% of human visual field. As part of this study, participant’s usage pattern  on a 6144x2034 display was observed for daily desktop computing and contrasted with traditional single or dual monitor usage. An activity and event log was maintained and followed with a daily interview.

On the basis of results, it was found that :

• Large display was preferred most and even with dual monitors people ran short of screen space.
• Mostly participants divided screen into ‘focal area’ for their primary tasks and used ‘peripheral area’ for other tasks. With dual monitors, focal area was restricted to one of the monitors (71%) as there was a visual discontinuity in between. In case of large display, the focal area was right in the centre (81%).
• Certain activities such as web browsing had a worse experience in large display since applications did not scale well.
• In case of large display, users put more time on layout of applications as it “helped them afterwards”.

• When interacting with an application in peripheral area, it was dragged onto focal area even in the case of large displays.
• While moving and resizing events increased in large displays, maximizing and minimizing decreased.

Review

This is a very insightful study and presents some very deep design insights that can be included in any application for large display. Clearly, user interaction patterns vary a lot with display size for ex. resizing increases as maximize decreases but app windows are generally meant to be easily maximized than resized based on ‘regular’ display size.

A big limitation in the study is that it does not study usage with more than two monitors which may become commonplace in future.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at CHI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.