The Calibration and Evaluation of Speed-Dependent Automatic Zooming Interfaces

Josh Savage

Dept of CSSE, University of Canterbury

Fri Jul 16 15:10:00 NZST 2004 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Speed-Dependent Automatic Zooming (SDAZ) is an exciting new navigation technique that couples the user's rate of motion through an information space with the zoom level. The faster a user scrolls in the document, the 'higher' they fly above the work surface.

At present, there are few guidelines for the calibration of SDAZ. Previous work by Igarashi & Hinckley (2000) and Cockburn & Savage (2003) fails to give values for predefined constants governing their automatic zooming behaviour. The absence of formal guidelines means that SDAZ implementers are forced to adjust the properties of the automatic zooming by trial and error.

This seminar identifies the low-level components of SDAZ and discusses the results from a formal evaluation designed to establish optimal calibration settings. A new system is then presented that provides a comprehensive graphical user interface for customising SDAZ behaviour. This system was used to configure three SDAZ interfaces: a text document browser, a flat map browser and a multi-scale globe browser. Finally, the results from an evaluation comparing the three calibrated SDAZ interfaces against three equivalent manual zooming interfaces are presented.