Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

   
4. Examples of Poor Use of Overlapping Windows

interface design!overlapping windows overlapping windows

Sometimes conversion from a command-line-based interface to a graphical display can cause problems. Hancock-Beaulieu et al. [#!hancock-beaulieu95!#] describe poor design decisions made in an overlapping windows display for a bibliographic system. (An improvement was found with a later redesign of the system that used a monolithic interface [#!hancock-beaulieu97!#].) Problems can also occur when designers make a `literal' transformation from a TTY interface to a graphical interface. The consequences can be seen in the current LEXIS-NEXIS  interface, which does not make use of the fact that window systems allow the user to view different kinds of information simultaneously. Instead, despite the fact that it occupies the entire screen, the interface does not retain window context when the user switches from one function to another. For example, viewing a small amount of metadata about a list of retrieved titles causes the list of results to disappear, rather than overlaying the information with apop-up window or rearranging the available space with resizable tiles. Furthermore, this metadata is rendered in poorly-formatted ASCII instead of using the bit-map capabilities of a graphical interface. When a user opts to see the full text view of a document, it is shown in a small space, a few paragraphs at a time, instead of expanding to fill the entire available space.