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Piles, tabs and overlaps in navigation among documents

Published: 16 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Navigation among documents is a frequent, but ill supported activity. Overlapping or tabbed documents are widespread, but they offer limited visibility of their content. We explore variations on navigation support: arranging documents with tabs, as overlapping windows, and in piles. In an experiment we compared 11 participants' navigation with these variations and found strong task effects. Overall, overlapping windows were preferred and their structured layout worked well with some tasks. Surprisingly, tabbed documents were efficient in tasks requiring simply finding a document. Piled documents worked well for tasks that involved visual features of the documents, but the utility of recency or stable ordering of documents was task dependent. Based on the results, we discuss the effects of spatial arrangement, visibility, and task-dependency, and suggest areas for future research on document navigation and its support by piling.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)A Generic Framework and Library for Exploration of Small Multiples through Interactive PilingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.302894827:2(358-368)Online publication date: Feb-2021
  • (2020)Supporting Software Developers' Focused Work on Window-Based DesktopsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376285(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2017)An Evaluation of Hybrid Stacking on Interactive TabletopsProceedings of the 2017 ACM Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects10.1145/3038450.3038451(13-20)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2017
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '10: Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries
    October 2010
    889 pages
    ISBN:9781605589343
    DOI:10.1145/1868914
    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: 16 October 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. document navigation
    2. overlapping windows
    3. piled windows
    4. window switching

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    View all
    • (2021)A Generic Framework and Library for Exploration of Small Multiples through Interactive PilingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.302894827:2(358-368)Online publication date: Feb-2021
    • (2020)Supporting Software Developers' Focused Work on Window-Based DesktopsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376285(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
    • (2017)An Evaluation of Hybrid Stacking on Interactive TabletopsProceedings of the 2017 ACM Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects10.1145/3038450.3038451(13-20)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2017
    • (2015)StackTopProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702613.2732742(1127-1132)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
    • (2013)An Evaluation of Stacking and Tiling Features within the Traditional Desktop MetaphorHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 201310.1007/978-3-642-40483-2_49(702-719)Online publication date: 2013
    • (2012)DisplayStacksProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2207676.2208406(2431-2440)Online publication date: 5-May-2012

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