A comparison of navigation techniques across different types of off-screen navigation tasks

Abstract

In many systems such as PDAs, users access data through a limited viewport. This means that users have to frequently navigate to regions that are off-screen to view important content. Many techniques exist for moving to offscreen regions; However, none of these have been evaluated across a range of different types of off-screen tasks. In this video, we demonstrate the effectiveness of several major off-screen navigation techniques across a variety of tasks. We also include two newly developed techniques - WinHop and Multiscale Zoom - that were based on complementary features of existing systems. Our results suggest that integrating complementary properties from different approaches can significantly improve performance on a wide range of off-screen navigation tasks. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.