Speed-dependent Automatic Zooming
Joshua Savage
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury
Abstract
Today's computer environment requires frequent browsing of documents too large for the viewing window. The current scroll and zoom interfaces are slow and inefficient. We present a new navigation technique called speed-dependent automatic zooming (SDAZ). It couples rate-based scrolling with automatic zooming. Zooming occurs automatically as the scroll speed increases, keeping the visual flow across the screen constant. This allows users to efficiently scroll a document without having to manually switch between zooming and scrolling or becoming disoriented by fast visual flow. We have designed two SDAZ interfaces---a map browser and a document browser. An evaluation of these interfaces against traditional interfaces showed that SDAZ is significantly faster and preferred by participants.
