Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014)
Original Kurzfassung:
Content on computer screens is often inaccessible to users be-
cause it is hidden, e.g., occluded by other windows, outside the
viewport, or overlooked. In search tasks, the efficient retrieval
of sought content is important. Current software, however,
only provides limited support to visualize hidden occurrences
and rarely supports search synchronization crossing applica-
tion boundaries. To remedy this situation, we introduce two
novel visualization methods to guide users to hidden content.
Our first method generates awareness for occluded or out-of-
viewport content using see-through visualization. For content
that is either outside the screen?s viewport or for data sources
not opened at all, our second method shows off-screen indica-
tors and an on-demand smart preview. To reduce the chances
of overlooking content, we use visual links, i.e., visible edges,
to connect the visible content or the visible representations of
the hidden content. We show the validity of our methods in a
user study, which demonstrates that our technique enables a
faster localization of hidden content compared to traditional
search functionality and thereby assists users in information
retrieval tasks.