HIERARCHICAL MULTI-WINDOW MANAGEMENT WITH ELASTIC LAYOUT DYNAMICS

Eser Kandogan

Window management is fundamental to all graphical user interfaces on which more advanced interfaces can be built. Almost all current windowing systems use the independent overlapping windows approach, where windows are allowed to overlap and operations on windows are performed one window at a time. However, the functionality and the design choices of these systems are based on the user needs and computer technology of 1980's. This dissertation presents a new windowing approach, called Elastic Windows, in which windows are organized in a hierarchical fashion on a space-filling tiled layout depicting semantic relationships. It supports multi-window operations which enable fast task-switching and reorganization of the windows with orienting elastic layout dynamics that preserves essential spatial relationships. The Elastic Windows approach is a spatially and operationally scalable alternative to current systems, extending organization, access and manipulation of information. It is well-suited to tasks such as web document, programming and personal role management. An empirical study with 12 computer science graduate students indicated statistically significant user performance improvements in medium and complex task situations such as report examination, job search and programming. Analytical studies confirm the findings of the user study and reveal that Elastic Windows provides a scalable organization that allows rapid access and manipulation of information. These results suggest that the design principles of Elastic Windows are applicable to a variety of domains such as visualization systems, office information systems and visual languages, where an improvement in users' capability to manage larger amounts of information would make a significant impact in productivity.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Problem
  • Motivation
    • Organization
    • Access
    • Manipulation
  • Elastic Windows Approach
    • Description
    • Evaluation
    • Scope and Limitations
  • Contributions
  • Content
• Related Work
  • Systems
    • Organization Perspective
    • Access Perspective
    • Manipulation Perspective
      • History of Windowing Systems
  • Psychological Studies
• Design
  • Origin
  • Principles
    • Hierarchical Window Organization
      • Mapping
      • Visual design
    • Space-filling Tiled Layout and Elastic Dynamics
      • Static Layout Properties
      • Dynamic Layout Properties
      • Alternatives
    • Multi-Window Operations
      • Open/Close
      • Group
      • Move/Copy
      • Resize
      • Maximize/Return
      • Pack/Unpack and Iconify
      • Save/Retrieve Layout
      • Reorganize layout
      • Hierarchicons
      • Min width/height
      • Usability
• Applications
  • Mail-tool
    • Motivation
    • Design
    • Benefits
    • Scenario
  • Personal Role Manager
    • Motivation
    • Design
    • Benefits
    • Scenario
  • World-Wide Web Browser
    • Motivation
    • Design
    • Benefits
    • Scenario
• Software Architecture, Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Software Architecture
    • Existing Window Architectures
    • Elastic Windows Architecture
    • Desktop
    • Window Handler
    • Content Handler
    • Object Store
    • Window Hierarchy Cache
    • Implementation Details
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
    • Problem Domain
    • Existing Data Structures
    • Elastic Windows Data Structures
    • Window Hierarchy
    • Elastic Window Operations
      • Open / Close
      • Move / Copy
      • Resize
      • Propagation
      • Maximize / Return
      • Pack / Unpack
      • Horizontal, Vertical and Tiled Reorganization
      • Find Window
      • Hierarchicons
      • Minimum Size Constraints
    • Alternative Layout Dynamics
      • Plow
      • Block
      • Bubble
    • Performance
      • Insertion and Deletion
      • Structure Operations
      • Proximity Queries
• Evaluation
  • Background
    • User studies and observations
    • Analytical studies
  • User Study
    • Aim
    • Design
      • Subjects
      • Method
      • Tasks
      • Hypothesis
      • Interfaces
      • Training
      • Procedure
      • Statistics
    • Results
      • Task Environment Setup
      • Task Switching
      • Task Execution
    • Discussion
      • Task Environment Setup
      • Task Environment Switching
      • Task Executions
    • Subject Interviews
    • Conclusions
  • Metrics and Factors
    • Model
      • WebBook and Web Forager
      • vtwm
      • Elastic Windows
    • Static
      • Total Capacity
      • Scalability
      • Visibility
      • Information Density
    • Dynamic
      • Traceability
      • Accessibility
      • Viscosity
    • Summary
• Conclusion
  • Summary
  • Contributions
    • Design
    • Algorithms
    • Evaluation
  • Discussion and Implications
  • Limitations and Future Work
  • Conclusions
• User Study Materials
  • User Background Questionnaire
  • User Background Questionnaire Results
  • Consent Form
  • General Instructions
  • Advertisement
  • Practice Tasks
  • Task Sets
    • Set I
    • Set II
  • Subject Task Completion Times
  • User Satisfaction Questionnaire
  • User Satisfaction Questionnaire Results
• References
• About this document ...