Keeping things in context: a comparative evaluation of focus plus context screens, overviews, and zooming

Users working with documents that are too large and detailed to fit on the user's screen (e.g. chip designs) have the choice between zooming or applying appropriate visualization techniques. In this paper, we present a comparison of three such techniques. The first, focus plus context screens, are wall-size low-resolution displays with an embedded high-resolution display region. This technique is compared with overview plus detail and zooming/panning. We interviewed fourteen visual surveillance and design professionals from different areas (graphic design, chip design, air traffic control, etc.) in order to create a repre sentative sample of tasks to be used in two experimental comparison studies. In the first experiment, subjects using focus plus context screens to extract information from large static documents completed the two experimental tasks on average 21% and 36% faster than when they used the other interfaces. In the second experiment, focus plus context screens allowed subjects to reduce their error rate in a driving simulation to less than one third of the error rate of the competing overview plus detail setup