[Design] Thinking out of the box idea: Fish-eye Dashboard with Tiles

[Mimi Yin]

I think we should take into consideration that the results of Mary  
Czerwinski's research are founded in significant testing of working  
prototypes with real users. If there are any questions about the  
usefulness of a "Tiled Desktop View", we should first consider that  
her conclusions are drawn from more than just theory and conjecture.

Mimi

On Jan 12, 2006, at 1:48 PM, selva r wrote:

> Hi Philippe,
>
> It seems the author cited in your link is whom I was referring to.   
> The specific link I was addressing is actually the one Mimi posted  
> in her post when she initiated this thread.  I've re-cited the  
> initial part of her post at the bottom here for easier reference.
>
> Cheers,
> Selva
>
> Philippe Bossut <pbossut at osafoundation.org> wrote:
> selva r wrote:
>
> > BTW, I actually did not intend to address the stamping issue at this
> > time but it was just a related issue that came about when I tried to
> > assess the potential strenghts and weaknesses of the Fish Eye Tile
> > model by the MS employee as a possible solution for Dashboard.
>
> Which MS employee? Are you refering to the following paper (co- 
> authored
> by an MS staff member)?
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/Library/TRs/CS-TR-4368/CS-TR-4368.pdf
>
> That link was provided on this list by Davor back in November.
>
> Cheers,
> - Philippe
>
>
>
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>
>
> Mimi Yin <mimi at osafoundation.org> wrote: http:// 
> norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/
> details.cgi?id=450
>
> Oren Sreenby from UW sent me an interesting link to a presentation
> that Mary Czerwinski gave recently at their Computer Science
> Colloquium. Oren has been working with Mary on innovative new UIs to
> improve task management and task flow on the Desktop. Some of you
> will remember her from the NY Times article Brendan posted to the
> list a few months ago entitled: Meet the Life Hackers and how they
> deal with Constant Interruptions in their work.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html?
> pagewanted=3&ei=5090&en=c8985a80d74cefc1&ex=1287115200&partner=rssuser 
> la
> nd&emc=rss
>
> The first half of the presentation, focuses on ways to reduce
> "context-switching" on the desktop, which essentially boils down to
> better "window" management. A couple of interesting things to call
> out are:
>
> 1. Clipping the "important" part of windows, so that you can have
> many windows open at the same time without needing to overlap them
> because each window occupies most of your screen.
>
> (Clipping is tangentially related to OS X's Expose functionality,
> which allows you to tile your open windows in various configurations
> to help you find "lost" windows. However there are some significant
> differences:
> - Expose in OS X is modal, meaning you're either in a tiled view of
> your windows or in "regular" mode and you can't actually interact
> with the windows when you're in one of the Expose tiled modes.
> - Windows in Expose are simply shrunken, not clipped, so oftentimes,
> the shrunken windows are too small to be intelligible or provide any
> valuable information.)
>
> 2. Fish-eye display of window-clips where certain window-clips are
> "minimized" off to the side
>
> 3. Users can arrange their window-clips into clusters and project-
> based groupings
>
> 4. Subtle visual cues alert users to when window-clips are active
> (ie. downloading files or syncing) versus dormant
>
> All of this amounts to a much more fluid approach to "getting things
> done". It reduces the cognitive load of constant context shifting:
> looking for lost windows, re-remembering what you were working on,
> checking upon on the status of things.
>
> This then made me rethink our "summary-table" based approach to task-
> management in the Dashboard, so I started sketching out some more
> "tile-based" displays of open items in the "NOW" section of the
> Dashboard.
>
> We have an interactive graphical display for calendar (because it's
> simply easier for people to grok calendar data laid out on a calendar
> grid.) It would be interesting to explore a graphical display for the
> Dashboard and see if it improves our ability to "keep track of what
> we're doing."
>
> What if you could arrange your NOW items as re-sizable tiles, clipped
> to show the most important information, arrangable in any
> configuration, thereby
> * Allowing you to cluster groups of related items together,
> * Allowing you to control the relative prominence of items, and
> * Taking advantage of your ability to remember things based on
> where they are.
>
> I also experimented with adding a second dimension to the Dashboard
> view. In addition to sectioning the Dashboard horizontally by Triage
> status, I've also sectioned it vertically by "Relevance to Me". (ie.
> In the realm of email, that would roughly translate into "things To:
> Me", "things CC: Me" and "things sent to some list that I'm on"...but
> it should be something that users can fine-tune with explicit Drag
> and Drop.) The resulting effect is that you get these "spheres" of
> relevance, where items in the top-left-hand corner are the most
> relevant and relevance decreases as you move to the right and down.
>
> ...[cut]
>
>
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