Navigation techniques for dual-display e-book readers

  • Authors:

  • Nicholas Chen;Francois Guimbretiere;Morgan Dixon;Cassandra Lewis;Maneesh Agrawala

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however.