The loupe in user interfaces

October 21, 2003  |  David Person
6 Comment(s)

One of the worst limitations of user interfaces is the low resolution of video displays. I’m interested in ways of overcoming that limitation.

1) The Mac OS X dock has a wonderful magnification feature.

2) In a similar vein, this applet uses magnification to eliminate scroll bars in a list box.

This method does have one drawback: the first few items are illegible until the cursor highlights it, but in my opinion that is outweighed by the convenience of not having to scroll.

3) ThumbsPlus, an excellent graphics viewer and cataloger, has a loupe feature in the new version. Press ‘q’ while viewing an image, and the portion over the cursor is magnified.

4) The new version of OS X has Expose; a demonstration applet is available here (click on the ‘try it out’ icon).

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Magnification can be a powerful tool. I think it is certainly better than many alternatives: reduced detail, sequential display, or scrolling come to mind.

An analogy could be made with the human eye (only a small portion of our eyes can see much detail; much of our field of view is only good at detecting movement), but I am leery of computer-to-human analogies.

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Does anyone have any other examples, or insights?

Comments
  • Steve Sprague says:
    October 21, 2003 at 8:14 pm

    Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional has a very nice resizeable loupe feature, with the magnification level adjustable to 6400%, for viewing pdf files. This is in addition to its regular zoom feature.

  • Branimir Dolicki says:
    October 22, 2003 at 5:20 am

    In his book The
    Humane Interface     the creator of Apple Macintosh Jef Raskin describes a new
    navigation interface he calls ZoomWorld.

    Raskin compares current navigation interfaces to a maze:

    If you wanted to design a navigation scheme intended to confuse you
    might begin by making the interface mazelike. The maze would put you in
    a little room with a number of doors leading this way and that. The
    doors’ labels are usually short, cryptic or iconic, and they may change
    or disappear, depending on where you’ve been. You cannot see what is on
    the other side of a door except by going through it, and when you have
    gone through, you may or may not be able to see the room you’ve just
    left…

    …
    The antithesis of a maze is a situation in which you can see your goal
    and the path to get there, one that preserves your sense of location
    while under way, making it equaly easy to get back.

    Enter ZoomWorld:

    … ZoomWorld … is based on the idea that you have access to an
    infinite plane of information having infinite resolution. The plane is
    ZoomWorld. Everything you can access is displayed somewhere on ZoomWorld
    …

    To see more of ZoomWorld, you think of yourself as flying higher and
    higher above it. To look at a particular item, you dive down to it…

    … A footnote can be more than just a reference. You can zoom in to the entire referenced work. Zooming here is functioning like a link, except that to get back to the main discussion, you zoom out; you do not have to keep a trail of where you have been. To make it easy to find a set of documents, the documents themselves can be arranged in a distinctive pattern that is visible when zoomed out. A page with very large lettering can be seen while zoomed out and used as a title.

  • Jeffrey Berg says:
    October 22, 2003 at 1:13 pm

    The Opera browser has a built in zoom function. http://www.opera.com/features/zoom/

  • Barry Isralewitz says:
    October 23, 2003 at 9:29 am

    Try the Java demos of

    Zomit: A Zoomable User Interface .

    It looks like some careful thinking went into this. Mouse gestures starting
    in pie menus (“flow menus”) control zooming, panning, and creation of new types
    of views. Some regions are special and offer views or links to the data.
    There’s even a zoomable “where am I?” context view, which thoughtfully fades
    the main view the further one zooms out the (temporary) context view.

    One of the demo data sets offers a genome to browse; one can smoothly zoom
    from chromosomes to genes to genetic sequence!

  • David Montgomery says:
    October 23, 2003 at 10:27 am

    Have you considered populating your machine with multiple video adapters to increase your viewable desktop without sacrificing your resolution? I have two monitors attached to my workstation that display a contiguous desktop. I don’t know if the Mac will support this but I would be surprised if it didn’t.

  • David Person says:
    October 23, 2003 at 11:38 am

    David: I use two monitors, each set at a resolution of 1600×1200, for a total desktop of 3200×1200. It is wonderful and really helps productivity.

    Today the New York TImes called Exposé “the biggest graphical breakthrough that operating systems have achieved in years.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/technology/circuits/23stat.html?ex=1382328000&en=630b764af36531b1&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

    [link updated March 2005]

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