A Taxonomy of Design Variables for Peripheral and Glanceable Displays
People who engage regularly with technology interact with hundreds of visual, auditory, and multimodal displays each day. These displays, which have been described as calm technology or peripheral or ambient displays, move information from the periphery to the center of human attention and back. Our team is working to determine the best sets of design variable to use to reduce the time it takes to extract information from a display.
While many novel ambient display designs have been proposed for everyday, most are point designs in a space that have rarely been systematically evaluated for effectiveness or even desirability. We are seeking to rectify this problem by performing a literature review of related work on information visualization, cognitive science, and peripheral displays, constructing a taxonomy of visual variables from the examples found in this research, and designing our own set of renditions to be tested in a study of an email display. Along with the taxonomy of visual variables, we are working on a set of design principles for using the visual variables to design effective peripheral displays.
Rohrbach, S., and Forlizzi, J. "A Taxonomy of Information Representations and Their Effectiveness in Ambient Displays." Submitted to DUX05. [local pdf, 1.7 MB]
Copyright 2006 Jodi Forlizzi.