Jason Alexander
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Publications by Jason Alexander (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Alexander, Jason, Cockburn, Andy, Fitchett, Stephen, Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2009): Revisiting read wear: analysis, design, and evaluation of a footprints scrollbar. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1665-1674. Available online
“In this paper, we show that people frequently return to previously-visited regions within their documents, and that scrollbars can be enhanced to ease this task. We analysed 120 days of activity logs from Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. Our analysis shows that region revisitation is a common activity that can be supported with relatively short recency lists. This establishes an empirical foundation for the design of an enhanced scrollbar containing scrollbar marks that helps people return to previously visited document regions. Two controlled experiments show that scrollbar marks decrease revisitation time, and that a large number of marks can be used effectively. We then design an enhanced Footprints scrollbar that supports revisitation with several features, including scrollbar marks and mark thumbnails. Two further experiments show that the Footprints scrollbar was frequently used and strongly preferred over traditional scrollbars.”
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» 2008 «
Alexander, Jason and Cockburn, Andy (2008): An Empirical Characterisation of Electronic Document Navigation. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Graphics Interface May 28-30, 2008, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. pp. 123-130.
“To establish an empirical foundation for analysis and redesign of document navigation tools, we implemented a system that logs all user actions within Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. We then conducted a four month longitudinal study of fourteen users' document navigation activities. The study found that approximately half of all documents manipulated are reopenings of previously used documents and that recent document lists are rarely used to return to a document. The two most used navigation tools (by distance moved) are the mousewheel and scrollbar thumb, accounting for 44% and 29% of Word movement and 17% and 31% of Reader navigation. Participants were grouped into stereotypical navigator categories based on the tools they used the most. Majority of the navigation actions observed were short, both in distance (less than one page) and in time (less than one second). We identified three types of within document hunting, with the scrollbar identified as the greatest contributor.”
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» 2007 «
Cockburn, Andy, Kristensson, Per-Ola, Alexander, Jason and Zhai, Shumin (2007): Hard lessons: effort-inducing interfaces benefit spatial learning. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1571-1580. Available online
“Interface designers normally strive for a design that minimises the user's effort. However, when the design's objective is to train users to interact with interfaces that are highly dependent on spatial properties (e.g. keypad layout or gesture shapes) we contend that designers should consider explicitly increasing the mental effort of interaction. To test the hypothesis that effort aids spatial memory, we designed a "frost-brushing" interface that forces the user to mentally retrieve spatial information, or to physically brush away the frost to obtain visual guidance. We report results from two experiments using virtual keypad interfaces -- the first concerns spatial location learning of buttons on the keypad, and the second concerns both location and trajectory learning of gesture shape. The results support our hypothesis, showing that the frost-brushing design improved spatial learning. The participants' subjective responses emphasised the connections between effort, engagement, boredom, frustration, and enjoyment, suggesting that effort requires careful parameterisation to maximise its effectiveness.”
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» 2006 «
Cockburn, Andy, Gutwin, Carl and Alexander, Jason (2006): Faster document navigation with space-filling thumbnails. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 1-10. Available online
“Scrolling is the standard way to navigate through many types of digital documents. However, moving more than a few pages can be slow because all scrolling techniques constrain visual search to only a small document region. To improve document navigation, we developed Space-Filling Thumbnails (SFT), an overview display that eliminates most scrolling. SFT provides two views: a standard page view for reading, and a thumbnail view that shows all pages. We tested SFT in three experiments that involved finding pages in documents. The first study (n=13) compared seven current scrolling techniques, and showed that SFT is significantly faster than the other methods. The second and third studies (n=32 and n=14) were detailed comparisons of SFT with thumbnail-enhanced scrollbars (TES), which performed well in the first experiment. SFT was faster than TES across all document types and lengths, particularly when tasks involved revisitation. In addition, SFT was strongly preferred by participants.”
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Mar 18th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
23 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Jason Alexander's author page.09 May 2009: Author was edited 12 May 2008: Author was edited
19 Jun 2007: Author was edited
19 Jun 2007: Author was added to the bibliography
