Hi Philippe,

It seems the author cited in your link is whom I was referring to.  The specific link I was addressing is actually the one Mimi posted in her post when she initiated this thread.  I've re-cited the initial part of her post at the bottom here for easier reference.

Cheers,
Selva

Philippe Bossut <pbossut <at> osafoundation.org> wrote:

selva r wrote:

> BTW, I actually did not intend to address the stamping issue at this
> time but it was just a related issue that came about when I tried to
> assess the potential strenghts and weaknesses of the Fish Eye Tile
> model by the MS employee as a possible solution for Dashboard.

Which MS employee? Are you refering to the following paper (co-authored
by an MS staff member)?
http://www.cs.umd.edu/Library/TRs/CS-TR-4368/CS-TR-4368.pdf

That link was provided on this list by Davor back in November.

Cheers,
- Philippe



_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design

Mimi Yin <mimi <at> osafoundation.org> wrote: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/
details.cgi?id=450

Oren Sreenby from UW sent me an interesting link to a presentation
that Mary Czerwinski gave recently at their Computer Science
Colloquium. Oren has been working with Mary on innovative new UIs to
improve task management and task flow on the Desktop. Some of you
will remember her from the NY Times article Brendan posted to the
list a few months ago entitled: Meet the Life Hackers and how they
deal with Constant Interruptions in their work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html?
pagewanted=3&ei=5090&en=c8985a80d74cefc1&ex=1287115200&partner=rssuserla
nd&emc=rss

The first half of the presentation, focuses on ways to reduce
"context-switching" on the desktop, which essentially boils down to
better "window" management. A couple of interesting things to call
out are:

1. Clipping the "important" part of windows, so that you can have
many windows open at the same time without needing to overlap them
because each window occupies most of your screen.

(Clipping is tangentially related to OS X's Expose functionality,
which allows you to tile your open windows in various configurations
to help you find "lost" windows. However there are some significant
differences:
- Expose in OS X is modal, meaning you're either in a tiled view of
your windows or in "regular" mode and you can't actually interact
with the windows when you're in one of the Expose tiled modes.
- Windows in Expose are simply shrunken, not clipped, so oftentimes,
the shrunken windows are too small to be intelligible or provide any
valuable information.)

2. Fish-eye display of window-clips where certain window-clips are
"minimized" off to the side

3. Users can arrange their window-clips into clusters and project-
based groupings

4. Subtle visual cues alert users to when window-clips are active
(ie. downloading files or syncing) versus dormant

All of this amounts to a much more fluid approach to "getting things
done". It reduces the cognitive load of constant context shifting:
looking for lost windows, re-remembering what you were working on,
checking upon on the status of things.

This then made me rethink our "summary-table" based approach to task-
management in the Dashboard, so I started sketching out some more
"tile-based" displays of open items in the "NOW" section of the
Dashboard.

We have an interactive graphical display for calendar (because it's
simply easier for people to grok calendar data laid out on a calendar
grid.) It would be interesting to explore a graphical display for the
Dashboard and see if it improves our ability to "keep track of what
we're doing."

What if you could arrange your NOW items as re-sizable tiles, clipped
to show the most important information, arrangable in any
configuration, thereby
* Allowing you to cluster groups of related items together,
* Allowing you to control the relative prominence of items, and
* Taking advantage of your ability to remember things based on
where they are.

I also experimented with adding a second dimension to the Dashboard
view. In addition to sectioning the Dashboard horizontally by Triage
status, I've also sectioned it vertically by "Relevance to Me". (ie.
In the realm of email, that would roughly translate into "things To:
Me", "things CC: Me" and "things sent to some list that I'm on"...but
it should be something that users can fine-tune with explicit Drag
and Drop.) The resulting effect is that you get these "spheres" of
relevance, where items in the top-left-hand corner are the most
relevant and relevance decreases as you move to the right and down.

...[cut]