There are many interface schemes that allow users to work at, and move between, focused and contextual views of a data set. We review and categorise these schemes according to the interface mechanisms used to separate and blend views. The four approaches are overview+detail, which uses a spatial separation between focused and contextual views; zooming, which uses a temporal separation; focus+context, which minimizes the seam between views by displaying the focus within the context; and cue-based techniques which selectively highlight or suppress items within the information space. Critical features of these categories, and empirical evidence of their success, are discussed. The aim is to provide a succinct summary of the state-of-the-art, to illuminate successful and unsuccessful interface strategies, and to identify potentially fruitful areas for further work.

Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual-display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however. Author Keywords E-book, reading, multiple display devices, embodied interfaces,

There are many interface schemes that allow users to work at, and move between, focused and contextual views. We review and categorise these schemes according to the interface mechanisms used to separate and blend views. The four approaches are spatial separation, typified by overview+detail interfaces; temporal separation, typified by zoomable interfaces; seamless focus+context, typified by fisheye views; and cue-based techniques which selectively highlight or suppress items within the information space. Critical features of these categories, and evidence of their success, are discussed. The aim is to provide a succinct summary of the stateof-the-art, to illuminate successful and unsuccessful interface strategies, and to identify potentially fruitful areas for further work.

Displaying scanned book pages in a web browser is difficult, due to an array of characteristics of the common user’s configuration that compound to yield text that is degraded and illegibly small. For books which contain only text, this can often be solved by using OCR or manual transcription to extract and present the text alone, or by magnifying the page and presenting it in a scrolling panel. Books with rich illustrations, especially children’s picture books, present a greater challenge because their enjoyment is dependent on reading the text in the context of the full page with its illustrations. We have created two novel prototypes for solving this problem by magnifying just the text, without magnifying the entire page. We present the results of a user study of these techniques. Users found our prototypes to be more effective than the dominant interface type for reading this kind of material and, in some cases, even preferable to the physical book itself.

In this paper, we show that people frequently return to previously-visited regions within their documents, and that scrollbars can be enhanced to ease this task. We analysed 120 days of activity logs from Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. Our analysis shows that region revisitation is a common activity that can be supported with relatively short recency lists. This establishes an empirical foundation for the design of an enhanced scrollbar containing scrollbar marks that helps people return to previously visited document regions. Two controlled experiments show that scrollbar marks decrease revisitation time, and that a large number of marks can be used effectively. We then design an enhanced Footprints scrollbar that supports revisitation with several features, including scrollbar marks and mark thumbnails. Two further experiments show that the Footprints scrollbar was frequently used and strongly preferred over traditional scrollbars. Author Keywords. Document revisitation, read wear, scrolling. ACM Classification Keywords. H.5. Information interfaces and presentation: User interfaces (Interaction styles, screen design).

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Interface designers normally strive for a design that minimises the user’s effort. However, when the design’s objective is to train users to interact with interfaces that are highly dependent on spatial properties (e.g. keypad layout or gesture shapes) we contend that designers should consider explicitly increasing the mental effort of interaction. To test the hypothesis that effort aids spatial memory, we designed a “frost-brushing ” interface that forces the user to mentally retrieve spatial information, or to physically brush away the frost to obtain visual guidance. We report results from two experiments using virtual keypad interfaces – the first concerns spatial location learning of buttons on the keypad, and the second concerns both location and trajectory learning of gesture shape. The results support our hypothesis, showing that the frost-brushing design improved spatial learning. The participants ’ subjective responses emphasised the connections between effort, engagement, boredom, frustration, and enjoyment, suggesting that effort requires careful parameterisation to maximise its effectiveness.

We present a prototype dual-display e-book reader that is designed to improve the electronic reading experience. Our device uses lightweight embodied interactions to support unselfconscious local navigation. We incorporate mechanisms such as Space Filling Thumbnails, which take advantage of the increased display space on our device to aid global navigation. To accommodate the need for cross document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace, our prototype provides detachable faces that can operate independently. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and

This paper presents a photo browsing system on mobile devices to browse and search photos efficiently by tilting action. It employs tilt dynamics and multi-scale photo screen layout for enhancing the browsing and the search capability respectively. The implementation uses continuous inputs from an accelerometer, and a multimodal (visual, audio and vibrotactile) display coupled with the states of this model. The model is based on a simple physical model, with its characteristics shaped to enhance controllability. The multi-scale layout holds both local and global view for users to both control photos and look at the surrounding context in a single framework. We show how dynamics of the physical model can be shaped to make the handling qualities of the mobile device fit the browsing task. We implemented the proposed algorithm on Samsung MITs PDA with tri-axis accelerometer and a vibrotactile motor. The experiment used seven novice users browsing from 100 photos. We compare a tiltbased interaction method with a button-based browser and an iPod wheel. We discuss the usability performance and contrast this with subjective experience from the seven users. The proposed tilt dynamics improves the usability over conventional dynamics. The iPod wheel has mixed performance comparing worse on some metrics than button pushing or tilt interaction, despite its commercial popularity.

Fig. 1. Document Cards help to display the important key terms and images of a document in a single compact view. Abstract — Finding suitable, less space consuming views for a document’s main content is crucial to provide convenient access to large document collections on display devices of different size. We present a novel compact visualization which represents the document’s key semantic as a mixture of images and important key terms, similar to cards in a top trumps game. The key terms are extracted using an advanced text mining approach based on a fully automatic document structure extraction. The images and their captions are extracted using a graphical heuristic and the captions are used for a semi-semantic image weighting. Furthermore, we use the image color histogram for classification and show at least one representative from each non-empty image class. The approach is demonstrated for the IEEE InfoVis publications of a complete year. The method can easily be applied to other publication collections and sets of documents which contain images. Index Terms—document visualization, visual summary, content extraction, document collection browsing 1