Year: 1991
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: UI innovations are often driven by a combination of technology advances and application demands. On the technology side, advances in interactive computer graphics hardware, coupled with low-cost mass storage, have created new possibilities for information retrieval systems in which UIs could play a more central role. On the application side, increasing masses of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. In the 1980s, text-editing forced the shaping of the desktop metaphor and the now standard GUI paradigm. In the 1990s, it is likely that information access will be a primary force in shaping the successor to the desktop metapho. This article presents an experimental system, the Information Visualizer (see figure 1), which explores a UI paradigm that goes beyond the desktop metaphor to exploit the emerging generation of graphical personal computers and to support the emerging application demand to retrieve, store, manipulate, and understand large amounts of infromation. The basic problem is how to utilize advancing graphics technology to lower the cost of finding information and accessing it once found (the information's “cost structurei). We take four broad strategies: making the user's immediate workspace larger, enabling user interaction with multiple agents, increasing the real-time interaction rate between user and system, and using visual abstraction to shift information to the perceptual system to speed information assimilation and retrieval.
Institution: Palo Alto Research Center
Language: English
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2007436697