Phosphor

Abstract

Sometimes users fail to notice a change that just took place on their display. For example, the user may have accidentally deleted an icon or a remote collaborator may have changed settings in a control panel. Animated transitions can help, but they force users to wait for the animation to complete. This can be cumbersome, especially in situations where users did not need an explanation. We propose a different approach. Phosphor objects show the outcome of their transition instantly; at the same time they explain their change in retrospect. Manipulating a phosphor slider, for example, leaves an afterglow that illustrates how the knob moved. The parallelism of instant outcome and explanation supports both types of users. Users who already understood the transition can continue interacting without delay, while those who are inexperienced or may have been distracted can take time to view the effects at their own pace. We present a framework of transition designs for widgets, icons, and objects in drawing programs. We evaluate phosphor objects in two user studies and report significant performance benefits for phosphor objects.

Personal Augmented Reality for Information Visualization on Large Interactive Displays

“…Change Blindness: Change blindness is a big problem on large displays due to the screen extending into peripheral vision [28] which makes acquiring an overview of the data [65] or comparisons [4] much more difficult. Motion and animation can be used to create awareness in peripheral areas [10], e.g., by temporary flashing, afterglow effects [13], or ambient light around the display [65]. However, while they increase awareness, they do not improve perception of the data itself and users have to move to the actual position to see what exactly changed.…”

Fortunettes

“…Most applications already provide some kind of feedback to explain what the result of an action is after that action has been completed. In cases where users fail to notice, feedback mechanisms such as Phosphor [10] can be used to add afterglow effects on top of UI widgets to provide feedback that fades over time.…”

Reciprocal Drag-and-Drop

“…This representation conveys the command's semantics better than a scaled-down snapshot of the full interface would, while using less screen real-estate. Nakamura and Igarashi [2008] later showed how to adopt such a comic strip metaphor in an application-independent manner, by emphasizing low-level user events and by using the Phosphor afterglow effect [Baudisch et al 2006] on affected widgets. These systems can be powerful, but browsing collections of pictures requires heavy-weight widgets, which makes them ill-suited to performing fast iterations in graphical layout design tasks.…”