The VIBE team's mission is to design elegant visualization and interaction techniques that span the full spectrum of devices and displays. Conceptually, we envision the user experience for the future of Windows and Office to have the following research challenges:

• Using Windows and Office today, while not a negative experience, is not as desirable as it could be. We intend to prototype example applications and views that enrich the future UX across devices so that it is more fluid, lively and pleasing. To do this we will need to develop excellent design guidelines and examples, and we intend to help the Windows shell team with their efforts along these lines.
• Our user interface designs do not scale well to the available screen real estate. Windows are hard to access on very large or heterogeneous displays, like Tablets and non-touch-enabled devices. Notifications come up where one is not attending, and windows open in unexpected places or are improperly sized for their contents. Our group desires to position and scale the presentation of a user's information clusters appropriately for the real estate and devices available. We intend to invent new solutions for how to make important content available and easy to interact with on any device, and on any surface.
• There are many redundant ways of interacting with Windows and Office applications today. We intend to devise elegant solutions to reduce visual clutter and interaction complexity without causing problems for users of legacy features. In this way, we will invent methods for simplifying the user experience given the on screen objects and devices available. Simplifying the UX allows us to map novel gestures and interaction techniques to better information visualization of information.

WorkFlow Changes across Different Display Sizes

VibeLog is a logging tool that allows us to research the ways that work practice might change as users move in between various sized displays throughout their work day. Once we understand work practice changes and issues from marrying our logging tool with ethnographic research data, we should have a good understanding of what parts of the designs of Windows and Office do not scale well across different display sizes. This fresh understanding, based on large amounts of log data, will justify where we should expend our research efforts in novel visualization and interaction, with an eye toward designing more elegant UIs.

Multiblending

Alpha blending allows the simultaneous display of overlapping windows?such as palette windows in visual workspaces. Although alpha blending has been used in some applications, such as games, it has not been widely adopted. One reason for the limited acceptance is that in many scenarios, alpha blending compromises the readability of content. We introduce a new blending mechanism called multiblending that uses a vector of blending weights, one for each class of features, rather than a single transparency value. Multiblending can in most cases be automatically optimized to preserve the most relevant features of both the palette and the background window. We present the results of a user study in which multiblended palettes provided higher recognizability of both the background and the palette than the best participating version of alpha blending.

Flat Volume Control

The hardware-inspired volume user interface model that is in use across all of today?s operating systems is the source of several usability issues. One of them is that restoring the volume of a muted application can require an inappropriately long troubleshooting process: in addition to manipulating the application?s volume and mute controls, users may also have to visit the system?s volume control panel to find and adjust additional controls there. The ?flat? volume control model eliminates this and other problems by hiding the hardware-oriented volume model from the user. Using the flat model, users use one slider per application to indicate how loud they want the respective applications to play; the slider then adjusts all hardware volume variables necessary to obtain the requested output. This simplifies controlling the volume of?and unmuting?any application, as there now is a single point of control for each application, rather than an entire hierarchy of such points. In our studies, participants completed all four volume control and mixing tasks faster and with less error when using the flat model than when using the existing hardware-oriented volume control model. Participants also indicated a subjective preference for the flat model over the existing model.

New User Interaction Models and Corresponding Visualizations

Larger display surfaces expose the limitations of some of the most fundamental Windows interaction primitives, especially minimize/ maximize and move/resize. It is possible we can create new interaction mechanisms that extrapolate better to displays of arbitrary sizes and configurations, by giving more consideration to the mapping between a user's attention space and the desktop layout space. We are exploring more sophisticated mechanisms for window movement, window placement, window grouping, and task switching. We are also running studies with external users to refine and optimize our designs in this area.

GroupBar, Timeline Views and Layouts

The ProjectBar, GroupBar are running prototypes designed to explore the integration of "project management" facilities into the current Windows taskbar. Windows currently doesn't help users group their open windows in any way - as more and more windows get opened, the screen and the taskbar get very cluttered, and productivity can be enhanced by offering the ability to selectively show and hide groups of windows organized into higher-level tasks. Each prototype explores a different interpretation of the higher-level task and a different visualization. In GroupBar, our latest prototype, each task is represented by a "Group" button or tab on the TaskBar, and Groups can be operated on much like individual window tiles. "Snapshots" of previous groups and desktop layouts can be captured and used to later restore those files and applications.

High-Density Cursor

As screen sizes increase, e.g. as multiple monitor configurations become more popular, users use higher mouse cursor speeds as well as stronger mouse acceleration in order to traverse the screen from side to side reasonably fast. The faster the mouse cursor moves, however, the more likely users are to lose track of it. One key reason is that the cursor is rendered only once per frame, which makes it visually jump from one rendering position to the next, with the distance increasing with the cursor's speed. high-density cursor addresses this issue by using a specific type of motion blur. By filling the space between the current cursor position and the previous one with additional fill-in cursor images, high-density cursor bridges the gaps between cursor positions, resulting in an effect similar to increasing the display frame rate. Since all cursor images exist only for a single frame, the proposed technique does not introduce any lag, which makes it different from similar-looking techniques, such as the MS Windows mouse trail.

Collaborating around Large Displays

Large displays can foster spatially co-located collaboration with people carrying information on various mobile devices. Today people gather around a whiteboard to brainstorm or gather in front of a TV to watch a film. The additional affordances of large displays - be they multiple monitor PCs, huge projected screens, or the heterogeneous display environments created by PCs, laptops, and PDAs - can be harnessed to help people work and play better together. We are exploring the new interaction techniques needed to manipulate and share information throughout this heterogeneous display space.

Drag-and-Pop

Drag-and-pop is an interaction technique designed to accelerate drag-and-drop on large screens. By animating potential targets and bringing them to the dragged object, drag-and-pop reduces the user effort required for dragging an object across the screen to a desired target. To preserve users' spatial memory, targets are not moved away from their original location, but are instead stretched using a rubber band-like visualization.

Notification

The current system for notifications is somewhat ad hoc and will not scale well as more and more applications make isolated choices about how and when to assault the user's attention. We are looking at how to best exploit the user's finite and fragile attention space, what new notification paradigms larger display surfaces create, and how to offer users the right amount of control over the aggregate behavior of the notification system. As in all of our work, we run user studies to ensure that our notifications system respects the user's attention and provides optimal support for their information needs.

Selected papers are included below.

• Czerwinski, M. A Diary Study of Task Switching and Interruptions. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria, April 21-26.
• Baudisch, P. and Gutwin, C. Multiblending: displaying overlapping windows simultaneously without the drawbacks of alpha blending. To appear in Proceeding of CHI 2004, Vienna Austria, April 2004.
• Baudisch, P., Pruitt, J., Ball, S. Flat volume control: improving usability by hiding the volume control hierarchy in the user interface. To appear in Proceeding of CHI 2004, Vienna Austria, April 2004.
• Tan, D., Czerwinski, M., Robertson, G. G. (Submitted).  Large displays enhance optical flow cues and close the gender gap in 3D virtual navigation.  Journal article submitted to Human Factors.
• Tan, D. & Czerwinski, M. (2003). Effects of visual separation and physical discontinuities when distributing information across multiple devices.  In M. Rauterberg et al. (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction--INTERACT '03, IOS Press, 252-255. Copyright IFIP, 2003.

• G. Smith, P. Baudisch, G. Robertson, M. Czerwinski, B. Meyers, D. Robbins, and D. Andrews, ?GroupBar: The TaskBar Evolved?, in Proceedings of OZCHI?03 (Australian Computer Human Interaction Conference), November 26, 2003, Brisbane, Australia, Univ. of Queensland, pp. 34-43.

• D. Tan and M. Czerwinski, ?Effects of Visual Separation and Physical Discontinuities when Distributing Information across Multiple Displays?, in Proceedings of OZCHI?03 (Australian Computer Human Interaction Conference), November 26, 2003, Brisbane, Australia, Univ. of Queensland, pp. 184-191.

• Czerwinski, M., Smith, G., Regan, T., Meyers, B., Robertson, G. and Starkweather, G.  (2003).  Toward characterizing the productivity benefits of very large displays.  In M. Rauterberg et al. (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction--INTERACT '03, IOS Press, 252-255. Copyright IFIP, 2003.
• Baudisch, P., Cutrell, E., Robertson, G. High-Density Cursor: A Visualization Technique that Helps Users Keep Track of Fast-Moving Mouse Cursors. In Proceedings of Interact 2003, Zurich Switzerland, August 2003, pp. 236-243.
• Baudisch, P., Cutrell, E., Robbins, D., Czerwinski, M., Tandler, P. Bederson, B., and Zierlinger, Z. Drag-and-Pop and Drag-and-Pick: Techniques for Accessing Remote Screen Content on Touch- and Pen-operated Systems. In Proceedings of Interact 2003, Zurich Switzerland, August 2003, pp. 236-243.
• Tan, D.S.,Czerwinski, M., & Robertson, G.G. (2003). Women Go with the (Optical) Flow. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2003, Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 209-215, ACM press. Copyright © 2003 by ACM, Inc.
• Tan, D. and Czerwinski, M. (2003). Information Voyeurism: Social Impact of Physically Large Displays on Information Privacy. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, April 2003, pp. 748-749, ACM press. Copyright © 2003 by ACM, Inc.
• Baudisch, P. & Rosenholtz, R. Halo: A Technique for Visualizing Off-Screen Locations. In Proceedings of CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, FL, April 2003, pp 481-488.
• Baudisch, P., DeCarlo, D., Duchowski, A., & Geisler, B. Focusing on the Essential: Considering Attention in Display Design. To appear in Communications of the ACM 46(3), March 2003.
• Czerwinski, M. & Horvitz, E. (2002). Memory for Daily Computing Events. Paper presented at HCI 2002, London, England, Sept. 2-6.
• Czerwinski, M., Tan, D.S. & Robertson, G.G. (2002). Women take a wider view. Paper presented at ACM SIGCHI 2002
• Baudisch, P., Good, N., Bellotti, V., & Schraedley, P. Keeping Things in Context: A Comparative Evaluation of Focus Plus Context Screens, Overviews, and Zooming. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, MN, April 2002, pp. 259-266.
• Tiernan, S.L., Cutrell, E., & Czerwinski, M. (2001).
• Tan, D.S., Czerwinski, M., & Robertson, G.G. (2001). Exploring 3D Navigation: Combining Speed-Coupled Flying with Orbiting. Paper presented at ACM SIGCHI 2001
• Tiernan, S.L., Cutrell, E., & Czerwinski, M. (2001). Effective Notification Systems Depend on User Trust, In Human-Computer Interaction--Interact '01, Hirose, M. (Ed.), IOS Press, pp.684-685. Copyright IFIP, 2001.
• Baudisch, P., Good, N., & Stewart, P. Focus Plus Context Screens: Combining Display Technology with Visualization Techniques. In Proceedings of UIST ‘01, Orlando, FL, November 2001, pp.31-40.
• Cutrell, E., Czerwinski, M. & Horvitz, E. (2001). Notification, Disruption and Memory: Effects of Messaging Interruptions on Memory and Performance. In Human-Computer Interaction--Interact '01, Hirose, M. (Ed.), IOS Press, pp.263-269. Copyright IFIP, 2001.
• Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E. & Horvitz, E. (2000). Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance, In Paris, C., Ozkan, N., Howard, S. and Lu, S. (Ed's.), OZCHI 2000 Conference Proceedings, Sydney, Australia, Dec. 4-8, pp. 356-361.
• Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E. & Horvitz, E. (2000). Instant Messaging: Effects of Relevance and Time, In S. Turner, P. Turner (Eds), People and Computers XIV: Proceedings of HCI 2000, Vol. 2, British Computer Society, p. 71-76.