Item Design

In addition to the spatial layout of items, the Scope can assist users in deciding which items to focus on by providing visual annotations (iconography) to make items more distinct and identifiable. We identified numerous properties that the Notification Manager can provide that might be of interest to the user. We chose to highlight a subset of these properties in order to maintain visual clarity, focusing on email items.

The visual coding of attributes went through several design iterations. Design criteria for the visual attributes are distinctiveness (each attribute having a unique visual representation) and discernability (items having a given property should be clearly different looking, even at small sizes).

Old item design

New item design

• items must have good contrast against each of the sector background colors
• the sector background colors must have good pairwise contrast
• if multiple item shapes are used, they must be easily distinguished, even at low level of detail
• any iconic or “glyph” annotations must be recognizable even when the user resizes the Scope window and must be simple to minimize visual clutter. Traditional icons do not resize gracefully and usually have a great deal of high-frequency visual detail. We have limited ourselves to simpler, more abstract designs.
• any properties coded as “glyph” annotations might not be shown in low-LOD mode, and thus should be used for less important properties
• design of item visuals should take into account impact of graphical complexity on the application’s frame rate. Some rendering techniques like animation and transparency can slow down display updates substantially when applied extensively. Their use should be carefully considered.
• at most one (subtle) animation cue should be used, and employed in a synchronized manner across items so that multiple items can be highlighted with a unified visual “pop-out.” We found that having items animate in sync (all starting the animation cycle at the same time) greatly added to a gestalt appearance that reduced the need to visually scan the display.
• “high urgency” and “newly arrived” are the most important properties, and must be identifiable at a glance
• “overdue” and “pinned” items should be easily identifiable
• with slightly more effort, users should be able to read other properties, such as the sender and addressee types.

Level of Detail (LOD)

We designed the Scope to live in a corner of the user’s display, sized small enough to be unobtrusive—and potentially rendered translucently on top of other windows. If the user moves the mouse pointer into the Scope window, it responds by changing into the active interaction mode: the Scope is popped to the top of the window stack, the window doubles in size, and the items are rendered in high-LOD mode, displaying all of the properties

Low LOD (mouse not in Scope)

High LOD (mouse in Scope). Additionally, a tooltip is displayed for the item under the mouse cursor.