ZUI

General Information

The basic idea is to have a map of the represented information and allow the user to zoom in and out. A zoomable interface has a relatively high information density. In fact, zoomed all the way out from the dataset, all of the information is visible and modifiable (not necessarily in a usable fashion).

Advantages:

• Spatial navigation
• Natural hierarchy (nested objects)
• High information density (needs strong visual cues to not turn into a disadvantage)
• Visual pattern recognition (with a well-designed GUI)
• High visibility when zoomed out

Disadvantages:

• Tunnel vision (only documents spatially close to each other visible at the same time, might be helpful to have sticky documents or another view; map)
• Probably high amount of resources needed to work on the datasets (all documents on a terabyte RAID visible at once, needs LOD)
• High amount of repetitive navigation work, though usually less than with WIMP Explorer-style file managers

• Introduction to ZUIs;

• Pad++ Zoomable Interface;
• Piccolo & Jazz web site a Java implementation of Pad++;
• Denim demo for PC/mac;
• 2GoTo.com an infinite Plane Fly-through ZUI, flash 100k, imports content from independent servers, works on phones/handhelds/PCs/macs;
• Jef Raskin - ZUI Demo: zooming is an important part of The Humane Environment;
• CounterPoint A zooming presentation tool;

This page is linked from: Archy