Monday, September 19, 2011

Reaction : A review of overview+ detail, zooming, and focus+ context interfaces

The author mainly focuses on the fact that everything that we interact with the computer is through a defined screen , which many have scrolling or windows which are mostly accepted standard interfaces. Still they introduce a discontinuity between the information displayed at different times and places. The main focus is to have a summary of interfaces that allow users to work at different levels and with a degree of detail which is effective to them. The "overview+details","focus+details" & "fisheye views" interface is very well explained by giving the Google Maps example. One of the good points of this paper is the snapshots of the exact problems that the author is talking about , like the thumbnails which we can clearly see the difference of having 5 versus 10 in the giving canvas.Later on there is also "cue based" , so all in all the 4 interfaces are dealt in detail and also supported with empirical study. Each of the interfaces have strengths however overview+detail and zooming interfaces have now kind of become the standard for most the desktops.

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