Browsing by Author "Cockburn, Andy"

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    BEYOND THE 'BACK' BUTTON: ISSUES OF PAGE REPRESENTATIONAND ORGANISATION IN GRAPHICAL WEB NAVIGATION TOOLS
    (1999-04-01) Cockburn, Andy; Greenberg, Saul
    Although the 'Back' button is good for revisiting very recently seen pages on the world-wide web, its recency and stack-based model makes it inefficent for navigating back to distant pages. The limitations of 'Back' have motivated researchers and developers to investigate graphical aids for web browsing. This paper examines the design and usability issues in two fundamental questions that all graphical tools for web-navigation must address: first, how can individual pages be represented to best support page identification?; and second, what display organisation schemes can be used to enhance the visualisation of large sets of previously visited pages? Our 'webView' graphical browsing system, which interacts with unaltered versions of Netscape Navigator, demonstrates new interface techniques for page representation and display organisation. WebView's page identification techniques included zoomable thumbnail images and a 'dogears' metaphor that offers a lightweight mechanism for bookmarking. Its display is organised using an integrated hybrid of three techniques: 'hub-and-spoke', which models the user's navigation within a site; 'site-maps', which model navigation between sites; and temporal organisation, which provides a recency ordered list of the visited sites.
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    Effects of view, input device, and track width on video game driving
    (Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, 2011) Bateman, Scott; Doucette, Andre; Xiao, Robert; Gutwin, Carl; Mandryk, Regan L.; Cockburn, Andy
    Steering and driving tasks -- where the user controls a vehicle or other object along a path -- are common in many simulations and games. Racing video games have provided users with different views of the visual environment -- e.g., overhead, first-person, and third-person views. Although research has been done in understanding how people perform using a first-person view in virtual reality and driving simulators, little empirical work has been done to understand the factors that affect performance in video games. To establish a foundation for thinking about view in the design of driving games and simulations, we carried out three studies that explored the effects of different view types on driving performance. We also considered how view interacts with difficulty and input device. We found that although there were significant effects of view on performance, these were not in line with conventional wisdom about view. Our explorations provide designers with new empirical knowledge about view and performance, but also raise a number of new research questions about the principles underlying view differences.
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    GETTING BACK TO BACK: ALTERNATE BEHAVIORS FOR A WEB BROWSER'S BACK BUTTON
    (1999-04-01) Cockburn, Andy; Greenberg, Saul
    This paper concerns the ubiquitous Back button found in most Web browsers. First, we outline why Back is an effective method for revisiting WWW pages: a) It allows rapid return to very recently visited pages, which comprise the majority of pages a person wishes to return to; b) People can use it even with a naive model of the way it works; c) People usually keep it on permanent display because it is visually compact; and d) Back works via a simple 'click until the desired page is recognized' strategy. Second, we investigate the behavior of Back. The typical stack-based behavior underlying Back is problematic because some previously seen pages are not reachable through it. To get around this problem, we offer several alternate behaviors of the Back button, all based upon a recency model. The advantage of recency is that all previously seen pages are now available via Back. Because trade-offs exist, we present both problems and prospects of these different Back behaviors in various navigational situations.
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    MAKING CONTACT: GETTING THE GROUP COMMUNICATING WITH GROUPWARE
    (1993-01-01) Cockburn, Andy; Greenberg, Saul
    Groupware is readily available. Yet people on wide area networks--such as the Internet--have considerable trouble contacting each other and setting up groupware connections. To resolve this problem, this paper identifies human factors critical to getting a group communicating through groupware. It identifies how people find suitable partners, and how people choose appropriate communication mediums. These factors form a design foundation for systems that promote social presence and that integrate communication. Existing systems are shown to be inadequate for general use over a wide area net, for they either do not meet some basic design criteria, or they require a very high technological entry level that is beyond the reach of most computer users. As an alternative, the paper presents TELEFREEK, a flexible, extensible, and customizable platform that supports people contacting each other, and that integrates access to common communication facilities. A major advantage of TELEFREEK is that it draws on resources freely available to the Internet community.
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    Testing the robustness and performance of spatially consistent interfaces
    (ACM, 2013) Scarr, Joey; Cockburn, Andy; Gutwin, Carl; Malacria, Sylvain
    Relative spatial consistency - that is, the stable arrangement of objects in a 2D presentation - provides several benefits for interactive interfaces. Spatial consistency allows users to develop memory of object locations, reducing the time needed for visual search, and because spatial memory is long lasting and has a large capacity these performance benefits are enduring and scalable. This suggests that spatial consistency could be used as a fundamental principle for the design of interfaces. However, there are many display situations where the standard presentation is altered in some way: e.g., a window is moved to a new location, scaled, or rotated on a mobile or tabletop display. It is not known whether the benefits of spatial organization are robust to these common kinds of view transformation. To assess these effects, we tested user performance with a spatial interface that had been transformed in several ways, including different degrees of translation, rotation, scaling, and perspective change. We found that performance was not strongly affected by the changes, except in the case of large rotations. To demonstrate the value of spatial consistency over existing mechanisms for dealing with view changes, we compared user performance with a spatially-stable presentation (using scaling) with that of a 'reflowing' presentation (widely used in current interfaces). This study showed that spatial stability with scaling dramatically outperforms reflowing. This research provides new evidence of spatial consistency's value in interface design: it is robust to the view transformations that occur in typical environments, and it provides substantial performance advantages over traditional methods.
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    Ubiquitous cursor: a comparison of direct and indirect pointing feedback in multi-display environments
    (Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, 2011) Xiao, Robert; Nacenta, Miguel A.; Mandryk, Regan L.; Cockburn, Andy; Gutwin, Carl
    Multi-display environments (MDEs) connect several displays into a single digital workspace. One of the main problems to be solved in an MDE's design is how to enable movement of objects from one display to another. When the real-world space between displays is modeled as part of the workspace (i.e., Mouse Ether), it becomes difficult for users to keep track of their cursors during a transition between displays. To address this problem, we developed the Ubiquitous Cursor system, which uses a projector and a hemispherical mirror to completely cover the interior of a room with usable low-resolution pixels. Ubiquitous Cursor allows us to provide direct feedback about the location of the cursor between displays. To assess the effectiveness of this direct-feedback approach, we carried out a study that compared Ubiquitous Cursor with two other standard approaches: Halos, which provide indirect feedback about the cursor's location; and Stitching, which warps the cursor between displays, similar to the way that current operating systems address multiple monitors. Our study tested simple cross-display pointing tasks in an MDE; the results showed that Ubiquitous Cursor was significantly faster than both other approaches. Our work shows the feasibility and the value of providing direct feedback for cross-display movement, and adds to our understanding of the principles underlying targeting performance in MDEs.
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    Understanding performance in touch selections: Tap, drag and radial pointing drag with finger, stylus and mouse
    (Elsevier, 2012-03) Cockburn, Andy; Ahlstrom, David; Gutwin, Carl
    Touch-based interaction with computing devices is becoming more and more common. In order to design for this setting, it is critical to understand the basic human factors of touch interactions such as tapping and dragging; however, there is relatively little empirical research in this area, particularly for touch-based dragging. To provide foundational knowledge in this area, and to help designers understand the human factors of touch-based interactions, we conducted an experiment using three input devices (the finger, a stylus, and a mouse as a performance baseline) and three different pointing activities. The pointing activities were bidirectional tapping, one-dimensional dragging, and radial dragging (pointing to items arranged in a circle around the cursor). Tapping activities represent the elemental target selection method and are analysed as a performance baseline. Dragging is also a basic interaction method and understanding its performance is important for touch-based interfaces because it involves relatively high contact friction. Radial dragging is also important for touch-based systems as this technique is claimed to be well suited to direct input yet radial selections normally involve the relatively unstudied dragging action, and there have been few studies of the interaction mechanics of radial dragging. Performance models of tap, drag, and radial dragging are analysed. For tapping tasks, we confirm prior results showing finger pointing to be faster than the stylus/mouse but inaccurate, particularly with small targets. In dragging tasks, we also confirm that finger input is slower than the mouse and stylus, probably due to the relatively high surface friction. Dragging errors were low in all conditions. As expected, performance conformed to Fitts' Law. Our results for radial dragging are new, showing that errors, task time and movement distance are all linearly correlated with number of items available. We demonstrate that this performance is modelled by the Steering Law (where the tunnel width increases with movement distance) rather than Fitts' Law. Other radial dragging results showed that the stylus is fastest, followed by the mouse and finger, but that the stylus has the highest error rate of the three devices. Finger selections in the North-West direction were particularly slow and error prone, possibly due to a tendency for the finger to stick–slip when dragging in that direction.