Although large displays are becoming more cost effective, most user interfaces are optimized for a single monitor of modest size even though many traditional workspaces such as desks and workbenches are much larger and some studies have found benefits from large displays. This paper explores whether a single monitor is sufficient for information work using standard software. A log-based longitudinal field study finds that most of the time a single monitor allows skilled information analysts to have a reasonable pattern of window activity. However, a novel visualization of the data shows that windows typically fill the monitor and the pattern is occasionally interrupted by window thrashing, the rapid manipulation of windows caused by limited display resource. Given these findings, we identify some common tasks that justify the development and the expense of wideband visual interfaces that are optimized for larger displays.

Wideband displays fill our field of view, creating new opportunities to develop effective visual interfaces. Although multiple monitors are becoming an affordable way to create wideband displays, the resulting seams create gaps in words and divide diagonal lines into nonaligned segments. We present several novel user interface techniques for creating seam-aware applications, proving that vendors need not wait for affordable seamless displays to exploit the potential of wideband displays.

This paper describes the 3Book, a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for various digital library and sensemaking systems. The book is designed to hold large books and to support sensemaking operations by readers. The book includes methods in which the automatic semantic analysis of the book’s content is used to dynamically tailor access.

This paper describes the 3Book, a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for digital library and information-intensive applications. The 3Book is able to represent books of almost unlimited length, allows users to read large format books, and has features to enhance reading and sensemaking.

Although vendors have made multiple-monitor systems for many years, our interfaces have been stuck in a 30-year old windows paradigm focused on displays much smaller than the desktops we use when working with paper. Advances in flat panel displays and graphics cards now enable affordable personal computers with 6-8 monitors and may someday eliminate seams. This paper argues that vendors should be developing wideband visual interfaces that are designed for displays that fill the human visual field. We describe a longitudinal field study of window activity that found that windows almost always filled a typical single monitor display and that subjects occasionally struggled with window thrashing when they needed to work with two or more windows at the same time. Vendors need not wait for affordable seamless wideband displays before addressing these findings. We have implemented several novel user interface techniques for creating seam-aware applications that target wideband displays based on multiple monitors.

The Fluid Documents project has developed various research prototypes that show that powerful annotation techniques based on animated typographical changes can help readers utilize annotations more effectively. Our recently-developed Fluid Open Hypermedia prototype supports the authoring and browsing of fluid annotations on third-party Web pages. This prototype is an extension of the Arakne Environment, an open hypermedia application that can augment Web pages with externally stored hypermedia structures. This paper describes how various Web standards, including DOM, CSS, XLink, XPointer, and RDF, can be used and extended to support fluid annotations.

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We have developed a novel user interface technique for hypertext, called fluid links, that has several advantages over current methods. Fluid links provide additional information at a link source to support readers in choosing among links and understanding the structure of hypertext. Fluid links present this information in a convenient location that does not obscure the content or layout of the source material. The technique uses perceptually-based animation to provide a natural and lightweight feeling to readers. In their richer forms, fluid links can provide a novel hypertext navigation paradigm that blurs the boundaries of hypertext nodes and can allow readers to fluidly control the focus on the material to support their current reading goals.

Spreadsheets augment a visible tabular layout with invisible formulas. Direct manipulations of the tabular layout may or may not result in the desired changes to the formulas. The user is forced to explore the individual cells to find, verify, and modify the formulas, which causes heavy cognitive overhead. We present a set of techniques that make these formulas and their resulting dataflow structure easily accessible while maintaining the natural appearance of the spreadsheet. Transient local views visualize dataflow structures associated with individual cells, while static global views and animated global explanations visually present the entire dataflow structure at once. Semantic navigation enables the user to navigate through the dataflow structure interactively, and visual editing techniques make it possible to construct formulas using graphical editing techniques. Central to these techniques is the use of animation and lightweight interaction for rapid and non-intrusive visualization. Our prototype implementation suggests that these techniques can greatly improve the expressive power of current spreadsheets as well as other applications that have rich underlying structures.

Several visualizations have emerged which attempt to visualize all or part of the World Wide Web. Those visualizations, however, fail to present the dynamically changing ecology of users and documents on the Web. We present new techniques for Web Ecology and Evolution Visualization (WEEV). Disk Trees represent a discrete time slice of the Web ecology. A collection of Disk Tress forms a Time Tube, representing the evolution of the Web over longer periods of time. These visualizations are intended to aid authors and webmasters with the production and organization of content, assist Web surfers making sense of information, and help researchers understand the Web.

The information presented in a document often consists of primary content as well as supporting material such as explanatory notes, detailed derivations, illustrations, and the like. We introduce a class of user interface techniques for fluid documents that supports the reader's shift to supporting material while maintaining the context of the primary material. Our approach initially minimizes the intrusion of supporting material by presenting it as a small visual cue near the annotated primary material. When the user expresses interest in the annotation, it expands smoothly to a readable size. At the same time, the primary material makes space for the expanded annotation. The expanded supporting material must be given space to occupy, and it must be made salient with respect to the surrounding primary material. These two aspects, space and salience, are subject to a negotiation between the primary and supporting material. This paper presents the components of our fluid document techniques and describes the negotiation architecture for ensuring that the presentations of both primary and supporting material are honored.

Research on information visualization has reached the place where a number of successful point designs have been proposed and a number of techniques have been discovered. It is now appropriate to begin to describe and analyze portions of the design space so as to understand the differences among designs and to suggest new possibilities. This paper proposes an organization of the information visualization literature and illustrates it with a series of examples. The result is a framework for designing new visualizations and augmenting existing designs.

Effective information access involves rich interactions between users and information residing in diverse locations. Users seek and retrieve information from the sources-for example, file servers, databases, and digital libraries and use various tools to browse manipulate, reuse, and generally process the information. We have developed a number of techniques that support various aspects of the process of user/information interaction. These techniques can be considered attempts to increase the bandwidth and quality of the interactions between users and information in an information workspace - an environment designed to support information work (see Figure 1).

This paper describes Butterfly, an Information Visualizer application for accessing DIALOG's Science Citation databases across the Internet. Network information often involves slow access that conflicts with the use of highly-interactive information visualization. Butterfly addresses this problem, integrating search, browsing, and access management via four techniques: 1) visualization supports the assimilation of retrieved information and integrates search and browsing activity, 2) automatically-created "link-generating" queries assemble bibliographic records that contain reference information into citation graphs, 3) asynchronous query processes explore the resulting graphs for the user, and 4) process controllers allow the user to manage these processes. We use our positive experience with the Butterfly implementation to propose a general information access approach, called Organic User Interfaces For Information Access, in which a virtual landscape grows under user control as information is accessed automatically.

Increasing masses of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphic techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Spiral Calendar development process involved three major phases: 1) progressive design based on our experience using advanced graphics for user interfaces, 2) an implementation/evaluation cycle based on a new method for characterizing information access from dynamic displays, and 3) reuse of the spiral technique for a decision support visualization where the spiral helps the user keep track of decisions while designing the layout of aircraft cockpit controls. The Time Lattice, on the other hand has only been informally evaluated. However, it illustrates how different tasks require different advanced graphics technology. In particular, the Time Lattice uses of 2D transparent shadows to provide interactive access to a complex 3D object. Our experience developing theses visualizations should prove useful to others developing user interface that use advanced graphics.

In this paper we present a method, the Cost-of-Knowledge Characteristic Function, for characterizing information access from dynamic displays. The paper works out this method for a simple, but important, class of dynamic displays called direct-walk interactive information visualizations, in which information is accessed through a sequence of mouse selections and key selections. The method is used to characterize a simple calendar task for an application of the Information Visualizer, to compute the changes in characterization as the result of possible program variants, and to conduct empirical comparison between different systems with the same function.

This paper describes a general visualization technique based on a common strategy for understanding paper documents when their structure is not known, which is to lay the pages of a document in a rectangular array on a large table where the overall structure and distinguishing features can be seen. Given such a presentation, the user wants to quickly view parts of the presentation in detail while remaining in context. A fisheye view or a magnifying lens might be used for this, but they fail to adequately show the global context. The Document Lens is a 3D visualization for large rectangular presentations that allows the user to quickly focus on a part of a presentation while continuously remaining in context. The user grabs a rectangular lens and pulls it around to focus on the desired area at the desired magnification. The presentation outside the lens is stretched to provide a continuous display of the global context. This stretching is efficiently implemented with affine transformations, allowing text documents to be viewed as a whole with an interactive visualization.

The goal of virtual reality systems is to place the user in a three-dimensional environment that can be directly manipulated. Ideally, users cease to think of themselves as interacting with a computer and interact instead with the 2D environment. The usual definition of VR involves full immersion. That is, users wear head-mounted stereo displays to provide full visual immersion and special gloves that allow six-degree-of-freedom input for directly manipulating the environment. An alternative form of VR is being explored in a number of research labs. Nonimmersive VR also places the user in a 3D environment that can be directly manipulated, but it does so with a conventional graphics workstation using a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. The scene is displayed with the same 3D depth cues used in immersive VR: perspective view, hidden-surface elimination, color texture, lighting, shading, and shadows. As in immersive VR, animation and simulation are interactively controlled in response to the user's direct manipulation. Much of the technology used to support immersive and nonimmersive VR is the same. They use the same 3D modeling and rendering and many of the same interaction techniques.

UI Innovations are often driven by a combination of technology advances and application demands. On the technology side, advances in interactive computer graphics hardware, coupled with low-cost mass storage, have created new possibilities for information retrieval systems in which UIs could play a more central role. On the application side, increasing masses of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. In the 1980s, text-editing forced the shaping of the desktop metaphor and the now standard GUI paradigm. In the 1990s, it is likely that information access will be a primary force in shaping the successor to the desktop metaphor. This article presents an experimental system, the Information Visualizer (See Figure 1), which explores a UI paradigm that goes beyond the desktop metaphor to exploit the emerging generation of graphical personal computers and to support the emerging application demand to retrieve, store, manipulate, and understand large amounts of information. The basic problem is how to utilize advancing graphics technology to lower the cost of finding information and accessing it once found (the information's "cost structure").

Current information retrieval interfaces only address a small part of the reality of rich interactions amongst user, task and information sources. We view information gathering as an interactive, iterative activity involving multiple disparate information sources and embedded in the context of broader processes of information use. We have developed two key system components that enable information workspaces that adhere to this reformulation of information retrieval. The first is a design for a user/system interaction model for retrieval from multiple, disparate information sources. The second is a repository modeling system, called Repo, that represents meta-information about different information repositories in a manner that supports system operation as well as provides a direct information resource to the user. To test these ideas, we have utilized Repo and embodied the interaction model in the user interface of a system called Labrador.

Advances in computer technology have created new possibilities for information retrieval systems in which user interfaces could play a more central role. Our analysis of the problem suggests that what is needed from the user's point of view is not so much information retrieval itself, but rather, the amplification of information-based work processes. User interfaces enabled by this technology may be able to amplify work by modifying the cost structure of information used in work. As a consequence, we have attempted to go beyond the usual notion of an information retrieval systems to develop an "Information Workspace" that encompasses the cost structure of information from secondary storage to immediate use. As an implementation of the concept, we describe an experimental system, called the Information Visualizer, and its rationale. The system is based on the use of (1) 3D/Rooms for increasing the capacity of immediate storage available to the user, (2) an animated scheduler-based user interface interaction architecture, called the Cognitive Coprocessor, for coupling the user to information agents, and (3) information visualization for interacting with the information structure. The system and its rationale are described.

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The Information Grid (InfoGrid) is a framework for building information access applications that provides a user interface design and an interaction model. It focuses on retrieval of application objects as its top level mechanism for accessing user information, document, or services. We have embodied the InfoGrid design in an object-oriented application framework that supports rapid construction applications. This application framework has been used to build a number of applications, some that are classically characterized as information retrieval applications, others that are more typically viewed as personal work tools.

One of the responsibilities of an intelligent interface is to design presentations of application information. An effective approach to this problem is to automatically search a space of possible designs. Since these design spaces are often large and complex, an important issue is how to control the search. This paper describes the search architecture used by the APT (A Presentation Tool) system for the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information and discusses how it might be modified to handle more difficult design spaces.

The task of managing and accessing large information spaces is a problem in large scale cognition. Emerging technologies for 3D visualization and interactive animation offer potential solutions to this problem, especially when the structure of the information can be visualized. We describe one of these Information Visualization techniques, called the Cone Tree, which is used for visualizing hierarchical information structures. The hierarchy is presented in 3D to maximize effective use of available screen space and enable visualization of the whole structure. Interactive animation is used to shift some of the user's cognitive load to the human perceptual system.

Tasks that involve large information spaces overwhelm workspaces that do not support efficient use of space and time. For example, case studies indicate that information often contains linear components, which can result in 2D layouts with wide, inefficient aspect rations. This paper describes a technique called Perspective Wall for visualizing linear information by smoothly integrating detailed and contextual views. It uses hardware support for 3D interactive animation to fold wide 2D layouts into intuitive 3D visualizations that have a center panel for detail and two perspective panels for context. The resulting visualization supports efficient use of space and time.

The market now contains a bewildering variety of input devices for communication from humans to computers. This paper discusses a means to systematize these devices through morphological design space analysis, in which different input device designs are taken as points in a parametrically described design space. The design space is characterized by finding methods to generate and test design points. In a previous paper, we discussed a method for generating the space of input device designs using primitive and compositional movement operators. This allowed us to propose a taxonomy of input devices. In this paper, we summarize the generation method and explore the use of device footprint and Fitts's law as a test. We then use calculations to reason about the design space. Calculations are used to show why the mouse is a more effective device than the headmouse and where in the design space there is likely to be a more effective device than the mouse.

This paper proposes a concept for the user interface of information retrieval system called an information workspace. The concept goes beyond the usual notion of an information retrieval system to encompass the cost structure of information from secondary storage to immediate use. As an implementation of the concept, the paper describes an experimental system, called the Information Visualizer, and its rationale. The system is based on (1) the use of 3D/Rooms for increasing the capacity of immediate storage available to the user, (2) the Cognitive Co-Processor scheduler-based user interface interaction architecture for coupling the user to information agent, and (3) the use of information visualization for interacting with information structure.

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A bewildering variety of devices for communication from humans to computers now exists on the market. In this article, we propose a descriptive framework for analyzing the design space of these input devices. We begin with Buxton's (1983) idea that input devices are transducers of physical properties in one, two, or three dimensions. Following Mackinlay's semantic analysis of the design space for graphical presentations, we extend this idea to more comprehensive descriptions of physical properties, space, and transducer mappings. In our reformulation, input devices are transducers of any combination of linear and rotary, absolute and relative, position and force, in any of the six spatial degrees of freedom. Simple input devices are described in terms of semantic mappings from the transducers of physical properties into the parameters of the applications. One of these mappings, the resolution function, allows us to describe the range of possibilities from continuous devices to discrete devices, including possibilities in between. Complex input controls are described in terms of hierarchical families of generic devices and in terms of composition operators on simpler devices. The description that emerges is used to produce a new taxonomy of input devices. The taxonomy is compared with previous taxonomies of Foley, Wallace, and Chan (1984) and of Buxton (1983) by reclassifying the devices previously analyzed by these authors. The descriptive techniques are further applied to the design of complex mouse-based virtual input controls for simulated three-dimensional (3D) egocentric motion. One result is the design of a new virtual egocentric motion control.

Computer graphics hardware supporting real-time interactive 3D animation has the potential to support effective user interfaces by enabling virtual 3D workspaces. However, this potential requires development of viewpoint movement techniques that support rapid and controlled movement through workspaces. Rapid movement through large distances avoids wasted work time; controlled movement near target objects allows the user to examine and interact with objects in the workspace. Current techniques for viewpoint movement typically use high velocities to cover distances rapidly, but high velocities are hard to control near objects. This paper describes a new technique for targeted viewpoint movement that solves this problem. The key idea is to have the user indicate a point of interest (target) on a 3D object and use the distance to this target to move the viewpoint logarithmically, by moving the same relative percentage of distance to the target on every animation cycle. The result is rapid motion over distances that slows as the viewpoint approaches the target object. The technique can be used with 2D and multidimensional input devices. We also extend the technologies to move objects in the workspace.

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A bewildering variety of devices for communication from humans to computers now exists on the market. In order to make sense of this variety, and to aid in the design of new input devices, we propose a framework for describing and analyzing input devices. Following Mackinlay's semantic analysis of the design space for graphical presentations, our goal is to provide tools for the generation and test of input device designs. The descriptive tools we have created allow us to describe the semantics of a device and measure its expressiveness. Using these tools, we have built a taxonomy of input devices that goes beyond earlier taxonomies of Buxton & Baecker and Foley, Wallace, & Chan. In this paper, we build on these descriptive tools, and proceed to the use of human performance theories and data for evaluation of the effectiveness of points in this design space. We focus on two figures of merit, footprint and bandwidth, to illustrate this evaluation. The result is the systematic integration of methods for both generating and testing the design space of input devices.

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The increasing availability of computers with high-quality graphics and fonts has created an opportunity and an obligation for user interface designers. The opportunity is that designers can use graphical techniques to design more effective user interfaces. The obligation is that they must become experts at the design of graphical user interfaces. Current user interface toolkits provide very little design assistance. This paper describes a theory that supports automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information and shows how to extend it to support theory-driven design of graphical users.

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The goal of the research described in this paper is to develop an application-independent presentation tool that automatically designs effective graphical presentations (such as bar charts, scatter plots, and connected graphs) of relational information. Two problems are raised by this goal: the codification of graphic design criteria in a form that can be used by the presentation tool, and the generation of a wide variation of designs so that the presentation tool can accommodate a wide variety of information. The approach described in this paper is based on the view that graphical presentations are sentences of graphical languages. The graphic design issues are codified as expressiveness and effectiveness criteria for graphical languages. Expressiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language can express the desired information. Effectiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language exploits the capabilities of the output medium and the human visual system. A wide variation of designs are systematically generated by using a "composition algebra" that composes a small set of primitive graphical languages. Artificial intelligence techniques are used to implement a prototype presentation tool called APT (A Presentation Tool), which is based on the composition algebra and the graphic design criteria.

Specialized languages are often more appropriate than general languages for expressing certain information. However, specialized languages must be chosen carefully because they do not allow all sets of facts to be stated. This paper considers the problems associated with choosing among specialized languages. Methods are presented for determining that a set of facts is expressible in a language, for identifying when additional facts are stated accidentally, and for choosing among languages that can express a set of facts. This research is being used to build a system that automatically chooses an appropriate graphical language to present a given set of facts.

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