Spotlights: New scrolling technique accelerates skim reading
The
amount of data that we take in from screens each day through documents, email
chains, web pages and social media flows is enormous. The continuous scrolling
technique we typically use to browse this data is, however, far from perfect.
"In
conventional scrolling a number of objects are moving in the viewer window,
which is problematic for visual attention. First, motion blur makes it
impossible to focus on an object. Second, the user is not able to direct
attention for long enough to comprehend the content before it scrolls out of
the window," explains Postdoctoral Researcher Byungjoo Lee.
Together
with Olli Savisaari and Antti Oulasvirta they have developed a new scrolling
technique which better supports data processing in three different ways.
"Browsing
of long texts speeds up by 60% and less than half as much time is spent
locating the desired locations in the text. In addition, the probability of
noticing points of interest in the text is increased by 210% compared to normal
scrolling technique ", Dr. Lee explains.
Important
elements to the fore
The
new technique has been given the name Spotlights and is based on the spotlight
metaphor of human visual attention. According to existing research, visual
attention needs about half a second to focus, which is clearly longer than the
average amount of time that a sentence or picture remains on the screen when
using the normal scrolling technique.
"The
new technique locates on each web page, whether it is a pdf document, video or
web document, the visually important elements and presents them using a
transparent layer than appears on top of the text. The elements can be, for
example, pictures, tables or headlines. It chooses what you should focus and
allows you enough time to do that," Dr. Lee tells.
"Our
empirical evaluation showed that benefits are significant. In this way people
can scroll through as many as 20 pages per second and still retain information.
The technique improves recollection of browsed information", Prof.
Oulasvirta explains.
"Our
technique is the first to try to maximise the amount of the information on the
screen for human visual attention. To see such strong results is very
encouraging", Oulasvirta summarizes.
"Spotlights
is still a prototype. We seek possibilities to put this in practice in
browsers, PDF viewers etc.."
Source | http://www.eurekalert.org/
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Librarian
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence
(NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.
Note
| If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or
covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking
efforts for the same.
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