ABSTRACT
It is widely believed that overlapping windows are preferable to tiled (non-overlapping) ones, but there is very little research to support that belief. An analysis of the basic characteristics of windowing regimes predicts that there are, in fact, situations where overlapping windows are inferior to tiled. An experiment to test this prediction verified that there are indeed tasks and users for which tiled windows yield faster performance. This result suggests a need for closer study of the principles underlying windowing regimes, so that designers have a better understanding of the tradeoffs involved in using them.
- Bury, K. F., S. E. Davies, and M. J. Darnell. (1985). Window Management: A Review of Issues and Some Results from User Testing. Technical Report HFC-53, IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory, Human Factors Center.]]Google Scholar
- Card, S, K., M. Pavel, and J. E. Farrell. (1984). Window-based Computer Dialogues. Proceedings of Interact '84: First tFIP Conference on Human- Computer Interaction.]]Google Scholar
- Cohen, E. S., E. T, Smith, and L. A. Iverson. (1985). Constraint-Based Tiled Windows, Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Workstations.]]Google Scholar
- Goodfellow, M. J. (1985). WHIM, The Window Handler and Input Manager. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Workstations.]]Google Scholar
- information Technology Center, Carnegie-Mellon University (1984). User's Manual for Release I of the Information Technology Center Prototype Workstation.]]Google Scholar
- Lemmons, P. (t983a). A guided tour of VisiOn. Byte. 8(6).]]Google Scholar
- Lemmons, P. (1983b), Microsoft Windows. Byte, 8(12).]]Google Scholar
- Shell, B. (1983). The Interlisp-D programming system. Proceedings of CompCon Conference.]]Google Scholar
- Smith, D., E. Harslem, C. Irby, R. Kimbatl. (1982a), The Star user interface: an overview. Proceedings of the 1982 National Computer Conference.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Smith, D. C., C. ~rby, R. Kimball, and W. L. Verplank. (1982b). Designing the Star User Interface. Byte, 7(4).]]Google Scholar
- Teitelman, W. (1984). The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination. Technical Report CSL-83-11, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.]]Google Scholar
- Tesler, L. 1981. The Smalltalk environment. Byte 6(8).]]Google Scholar
Index Terms
- A comparison of tiled and overlapping windows
Recommendations
Novel interaction techniques for overlapping windows
UIST '01: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyThis note presents several techniques to improve window management with overlapping windows: tabbed windows, turning and peeling back windows, and snapping and zipping windows.
A comparison of tiled and overlapping windows
Special issue: CHI '86 Conference ProceedingsIt is widely believed that overlapping windows are preferable to tiled (non-overlapping) ones, but there is very little research to support that belief. An analysis of the basic characteristics of windowing regimes predicts that there are, in fact, ...
Copy-and-paste between overlapping windows
CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsCopy-and-paste, one of the fundamental operations of modern userinterfaces, 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 ...
Comments