From: Meltsner, Kenneth (Kenneth.Meltsner@ca.com)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 12:35:25 PDT
I've played with Jazz and Pad++, two zooming UI web browsers. It's fun, but
I find it much too easy to get lost. I'm not sure ZUIs have figured out the
killer metaphor yet -- the current systems are too much like desktops with a
zoom knob.
I think careful attention should be paid to how people navigate in the real
world. In chaotic cities like Cambridge, I tend to navigate by landmarks,
usually man-made. In the SF East Bay, I find myself orienting myself by the
natural landmarks like SF Bay and the Berkeley hills. In highly organized
cities like Milwaukee, I convert the street and number for my destination
and origin into Cartesian coordinates and then think about whether there are
any diagonal roads or highways that will help get me there faster. [I'd
suspect Washington DC is similar, except for some of the grid oddities
around Georgetown, horrible neighborhoods, and the relative lack of freeways
within the city core.]
The other idea I'd like to see more of in ZUIs would be the selection of
graphics based on scale -- like DataSplash at U.C. Berkeley. Instead of a
continuous zoom into a data graphic, at different resolutions the graphic
would change. The papers made the effect look quite slick -- you might
paint each state with a color depending on a composite property at low
resolution, and as you zoomed, additional detail (more properties,
locations, etc.) would be revealed -- the presentation would be
scale-dependent instead of presenting lots of incomprehensibly small detail
which needs to be zoomed into to be viewed properly.
Check out the Jazz applet at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil. Excentric labels
and fisheye menus are pretty cool as well -- good examples of using
focus+context to make overcrowded displays more usable.
Ken
-----Original Message-----
From: v - Mark Kuharich [mailto:mkuharich@punchnetworks.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 1:50 PM
To: 'FoRK@xent.com'
Subject: ZUIs
With ZUIs, subfolders need not be buried from view. The entire folder
structure, in miniature, is on-screen. As a mouse pointer rolls over a
folder or subfolder, that part of the structure leaps to the fore in
conventional-size type while the rest of the miniaturized file structure
remains on-screen. To drill down three or four levels, move the mouse an
inch or so. To get to Subfolder B, make another 1-inch mouse move. Total
clicks: none
http://pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,17454,00.html
Mark Kuharich
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