Dr. Patrick Baudisch

"Five new ways to squish large documents into small screens"

What happens when users switch from regular sized screens to a small screen device, such as a PDA or a Smartphone? Typical contents, such as web pages, maps, or photographs are now much larger than the screen. The naïve approach of panning and zooming is likely to leave users disoriented and also the "usual suspects", such as overview-plus-detail visualizations quickly reach their limits. In this talk, I am presenting a range of novel approaches for helping users cope with the lack of screen space.

HALO allows users to store additional content in off-screen space, yet makes sure users stay aware of that content.

MULTIBLENDING obtains higher information density my overlaying multiple layers of information; unlike traditional alphablending, however, it avoids inference between layers and thus assures visual clarity.

FISHNET enables visual search. It provides users with a readable area of web page content and at the same time shows search results from the entire page.

SUMMARY THUMBNAILS scale web pages to fit the width of the small screen, yet contain readable text snippets that allow users to identify relevant content.

With COLLAPSE-TO-ZOOM, finally, users can interactively reveal additional relevant material by interactively removing irrelevant areas.

All five techniques complement each other and together form a novel display system for smalls screen devices.

Patrick Baudisch is a research scientist in the field of human-computer interaction at the Visualization and Interaction Research Group at Microsoft Research. His focus is on interaction techniques that help users interact with very large displays and visualization techniques that allow users to view large documents on small screen devices. While at Xerox PARC, Baudisch created focus plus context screens. While at Fraunhofer-IPSI and during his stay as a guest researcher at the GroupLens project at the University on Minnesota, Baudisch worked on user interfaces for information filtering systems. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.