The Effects of Dual Display Configuration and Users’ Experience on Performance and Preference in Complex Spatial-Verbal Tasks

Working from home has become popular during Covid-19 pandemic and it promoted the use of dual displays to handle complex information coming with multi-tasking. Previous studies have shown that the use of dual displays can produce better performance; however, the effects of different dual display configurations on users’ performance in complex spatial-verbal tasks have not been systematically discussed. Furthermore, whether the user is experienced in utilizing dual displays may affect their performance and preference such as assignment of software windows. The current study investigated task completion time and user behaviors (window assignment, head turning counts and the number of window switches) in four display configurations (preferred primary-secondary screens, swapped primary-secondary screens, unified screens, and a single screen) via a realistic experimental task where participants operated 3D street view on Google Map (spatial task) to answer relevant questions in MS Word (verbal task). The results from 30 participants showed that the swapped primary-secondary screens (where the window assignment was different from the participant’s preference) and the unified screen caused significant more window switching and head turning; the task completion time also increased insignificantly. The participants experienced in using dual screen performed better than the non-experienced ones in all configurations but the unified screens. The experienced participants subjectively reported that they preferred to perform longer and more complicated operations on the primary display while the non-experienced ones said the opposite. Through this study the user behaviors in spatial-verbal tasks using dual displays were understood and guidelines were provided to improve user performance.