Visualizing locations of off-screen objects on mobile devices

Abstract

Browsing large information spaces such as maps on the limited screen of mobile devices often requires people to perform panning and zooming operations that move relevant display content offscreen. This makes it difficult to perform spatial tasks such as finding the location of Points Of Interest (POIs) in a city. Visualizing the location of off-screen objects can mitigate this problem: in this paper, we present a user study comparing the Halo [2] approach with two other techniques based on arrows.Halo surrounds off-screen objects with circles that reach the display window, so that users can derive the location and distance of objects by observing the visible portion of the corresponding circles. In the two arrow-based techniques, arrows point at objects and their size and body length, respectively, inform about the distance of objects. Our study involved four tasks requiring users to identify and compare off-screen objects locations, and also investigated the effectiveness of the three techniques with respect to the number of off-screen objects. Arrows allowed users to order off-screen objects faster and more accurately according to their distance, while Halo allowed users to better identify the correct location of off-screen objects. Implications of these results for mobile map-based applications are also discussed.

Wayfinding Through Orientation

“…In reality, however, due to their large distance to a route it is still an ongoing research agenda to identify effective ways to visualize them on small screens such as mobile phones. Studies have suggested ways of visualizing off-screen landmarks (Baudisch & Rosenholtz, 2003;Burigat et al, 2006;Gustafson et al, 2008), and here we designed a visualization using the similar theory but a different presentation.…”

Characterizing user performance with assisted direct off-screen pointing

“…For instance, for tasks that order targets from closest to farthest, scaled arrows work better than Halos [4]. For accurate positioning Halos or Wedges are preferred over arrows [2].…”

Guidelines for Designing Awareness-Augmented Mobile DUIs

“…Several alternative techniques for localizing off-screen objects have more recently been developed for use specifically on devices with small screens, including scaled and annotated arrows (Burigat, Chittaro, & Gabrielli, 2006), City Lights (Zellweger, Mackinlay, Good, Stefik, & Baudisch, 2003), Halo (Baudisch & Rosenholtz, 2003), and Wedge (Gustafson, Baudisch, Gutwin, & Irani, 1998). These techniques use different methods to visually encode both directional and distance information, providing compact support for off-screen object visualization.…”

“…These techniques use different methods to visually encode both directional and distance information, providing compact support for off-screen object visualization. Whereas user studies (Baudisch & Rosenholtz, 2003;Burigat et al, 2006;Gustafson et al, 2008) have shown the competing advantages of different techniques for off-screen object visualization, no evaluation has, to our knowledge, been made of their application for user awareness in mobile shared workspaces.…”