Improved Scrolling with Speed Dependent Automatic Zooming

Andy Cockburn

Dept of CSSE, University of Canterbury

Fri Jun 04 15:10:00 NZST 2004 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Speed-dependent automatic zooming (SDAZ) is a scrolling enhancement that couples the zoom level of an information space with the user's rate of motion through it---the faster the user scrolls, the 'higher' they fly above the work surface. Automatic zooming is intended to maintain a pixel-based rate of movement that remains below that at which motion-blur occurs despite rapid movement through the document.

This seminar describes our work on calibrating and testing interface variations on the SDAZ theme. We report recent results showing that SDAZ allows visual search scrolling tasks to be completed more rapidly than traditional scrollbars and rate-based scrolling allow. Subjective preferences also strongly favour SDAZ.