Navigation

 

Research Interests

My current research interests involve secondary displays. Specifically, I am interested in the design and evaluation of displays with the purpose of increasing effectiveness and use.

Some of the first research I have done in the area involves display attributes of secondary displays. My first published work was done in the fall of 2000 and published in March of 2001. It involved multiple displays and comparisons between faders and tickers, with emphasis on how the two types of displays contribute to information recognition and cognition.

Continuing research in the field has addressed information density and its effects on information understanding. We had participants play a simple video game and at the same time, look at pictures with information in them. We then asked questions about the pictures. The write-up of the work was published to the VisSym'02 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

We then shifted our focus to comparing textual to graphical representations in secondary displays. We had participants search through web pages looking for answers to questions while simultaneously monitoring information in either a graphical or textual display of a machine load. Results are mixed, with different design recommendations based on design goals. The work was accepted in the 40th Annual ACM Southeast Conference.

Next the research shifted to involve the ordering of secondary display attributes. Cleveland and McGill did work on focal displays with paper based medium and we extended their work to secondary displays on computer screens. Initial work was done by my colleague, C. M. Chewar , in which she and others found that position was better than both color and area as a representation mechanism for focal displays on computers. As for secondary displays, the ordering changes when there is introduction of primary task degradation. The work was accepted in the VisSym'02 conference.

We extended the work to include various colors (red, yellow, green, blue, gray), along with angle, motion, and others.

I then shifted my attention to evaluation of a specific type of secondary display (or notification system). I focused in on large screen displays because they interest me and I often saw institutions that own one or more; but the displays sit unused for large periods of time.

To address this, I refined my focus to include the types of software people could use on large screen displays that would support their information requirments without distracting them from their normal work. This effort developed into my doctoral thesis, "Developing Heuristic Evaluation Methods for Large Screen Information Exhibits Based on Critical Parameters". See my publications page for examples of published work.