Hardware Support for Navigating Large Digital Documents

Abstract

Buxton and Myers (1986) compared a specialized document navigation device and a scrollbar. Their device tracked finger movements along two touch-sensitive areas: one for absolute movement and one for relative movement. They found that their system was faster when navigating a 5-page document. We identified finger-tracking issues with the Buxton and Myers device for larger documents (100 pages) and developed an alternative device employing a range sensor and rotary encoder to track finger movement. We ran a new experiment comparing the traditional scrollbar, the Buxton and Myers design, and our new design. Both the Buxton and Myers design and our new design were poorly received by users compared to the scrollbar. Our results indicate that in a large document, factors beyond finger tracking accuracy influence the performance of a device providing absolute movement. From these results, we identify possible improvements necessary to implement effective and practical absolute navigation devices.

This work was supported in part by NSF Grant IIS-0414699. We thank Andy Cockburn for graciously providing us with the source of his document visualization system and John Stasko for his help and support. Corinna Lockenhoff provided extensive feedback on our experimental design. Ben Bederson provided many useful comments. Lastly, Bill Pugh and Bobby Bhatacharjee were integral in our securing the 3D printer used for building the devices.