We will perform a long-term longitudinal field study with about 20 participants over 4-weeks in order to understand how people actually use the WindowsTagging through log analysis and users feedbacks. We will also continue to complete the ”theory” of task switching and expand the window tagging mechanism to improve the efficiency of task switching.
Chapter 7
Conclusion And Future Work
In this dissertation, we have described a set of contributions to the study and de- velopment of window management techniques. The work presented in this dissertation contributes to understand users’ activities on window management, build the theory of window switching and conceptualize some operations, and provide some design principles to improve window switching techniques. In this final chapter we first re-examine and discuss the research objectives presented at the beginning of this dissertation. We then summarize the findings and conclusions of the work. Finally, we provide several potential avenues for future work.
7.1 Research Objectives
The over-arching goal of this dissertation was to understand and improve window switching techniques. More specifically, the dissertation set out to achieve four goals:
1. Understand users’ activities on window management and the reasons users choose to employ switching techniques.
2. Understand current window/group switching techniques where and when they are effective and ineffective.
3. Theorize window/group switching and define types of switching operations which have been justified by read-world usage data, and then provide some design princi- ples to help designers to design new switching techniques.
4. Using the knowledge gathered in the previous goals, analyses, design and evaluate new switching techniques based on the design objective aforementioned.
We defined these four goals at the beginning of this dissertation 1, now we examine and discuss the implementation of these goals with the alignment of the research outputs.
Objective 1 was completed via a log-based longitudinal study and a questionnaire investigation. To implement this study,WindowsOSLog was developed to log user actions in mainstream Windows operating system. The window management activities of 26 participants were monitored over 5-weeks. Chapter 3 presented the process and results of this study in details. A large range of activities statistics were reported including the number of windows opened simultaneously on the desktop, the distribution of window size, the occurrence ratio of the main window events, the distribution of window switching techniques, types of switching of users requirement, the number of visible windows and the number of window groups.
Objective 2 was completed via a review of previous work and an experiment to compare current window switching techniques in different scenarios. Chapter2described a review of the current knowledge in the domain of window and group switching techniques, the disadvantages and advantages of some window switching techniques were also presented in this chapter. However the previous work could not accomplish this goal, so an experiment was conducted to help us to achieve this goal. Chapter 5 presented the experiment to compare all mainstream window switching techniques in different scenarios. The results showed that Taskbar was the best choice when the number of windows is small and for users who always maximize their windows,Alt+Tab was the best choice when the number of windows is important.
Objective 3 required an explanation of the observations from the longitudinal study and a review of previous work. The previous work was presented in Chapter2. Chapter6 presented the eleven design principles, including: 1) allow implicit and explicit methods to create groups, 2) keep the position relationship among windows as much as possible with automatically defined groups, 3) allow a window to be in multiple groups at the same time, 4) allow users to explicitly change groups structure, including adding/removing windows in groups and creating new groups using existing groups, 5) allow users to switch between windows or groups or selected windows of groups, 6) allow users to switch between windows from multiple groups at once and without affecting the grouping structure, 7)
7.1 Research Objectives
allow users to add semantic information to mark their tasks, 8) allow users to search windows or groups by some keywords, 9) keep a stable groups layout to allow users to make effective use of their spatial memory, 10) provide some operations for groups, such as move, resize, and 11) allow users to delete groups.
Objective 4 was deemed successful if the newly designed window switching techniques was significantly faster and subjectively preferred over the traditional window switching techniques. Chapter4presented the analysis, design and evaluation of thePush-and-Pull Switching, a window switching technique using window overlapping to implicitly define groups. The empirical evaluations found that Push-and-Pull Switching was 50% faster than other switching techniques in different scenarios. The longitudinal user study indi- cates that participants invoked this switching technique 15% of the time on single monitor displays while they found it easy to understand and use. Chapter5presented stack scan- ning, a window switching technique based on a widget that combines generalized scrolling and crossing to control the stack order of layers of visible windows. The empirical eval- uations found that stack scanning was faster than other techniques when the number of windows is high and the visual similarity among windows is important. Chapter 6 pre- sented WindowsTagging, a task switching techniques that combines implicit and explicit definition of groups, spatial and visual memories to help users to quickly find windows or groups and switch between them. Window tagging mechanism was first used in the domain of task switching techniques to allow users to explicitly create or modify groups by tags. The empirical evaluations found that WindowsTagging was faster than Expos´e technique, and participants strongly preferred it. The longitudinal study also showed that WindowsTagging is very effective and can improve task management.
Finally, in line with the overall research objective, this dissertation has presented char- acterizations that have significantly improved the research knowledge of window switch- ing techniques. The value of this knowledge to improve window switching techniques was demonstrated in the design of thePush-and-Pull Switching,stack scanning andWindow- sTagging.