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Exploring new window manipulation techniques

Published: 23 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Moving and resizing desktop windows are frequently performed but largely unexplored interaction tasks. The standard title bar and border dragging techniques used for window manipulation have not changed much over the years. We studied three new methods to move and resize windows. The new methods are based on proxy and goal-crossing techniques to eliminate the need of long cursor movements and acquiring narrow window borders. Instead, moving and resizing actions are performed by manipulating proxy objects close to the cursor and by sweeping cursor motions across window borders. We compared these techniques with the standard techniques. The results indicate that further investigations and redesigns of window manipulation techniques are worthwhile: all new techniques were faster than the standard techniques, with task completion times improving more than 50% in some cases. Also, the new resizing techniques were found to be less error-prone than the traditional click-and-drag method.

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    OZCHI '09: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7
    November 2009
    445 pages
    ISBN:9781605588544
    DOI:10.1145/1738826
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 23 November 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. novel interaction techniques
    2. window management
    3. window moving
    4. window resizing

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    OZCHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 60 submissions, 53%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

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