Spotlights: Facilitating skim reading with attention-optimized highlights

Byungjoo Lee, Antti Oulasvirta

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This demo presents Spotlights, a technique to facilitate skim reading, or the activity of rapidly comprehending long documents such as webpages or PDFs. Users mainly use continuous rate-based scrolling to skim. However, visual attention fails when scrolling rapidly due to excessive number of objects and brief exposure per object. Spotlights supports continuous scrolling at high speeds. It selects a small number of objects and raises them to transparent overlays (spotlights) in the viewer. Spotlights stay static for a prolonged time and then fade away. The technical contribution is novel method for "brokering" user's attentional resources in a way that guarantees sufficient attentional resources for some objects, even at very high scrolling rates. It facilitates visual attention by (1) decreasing the number of objects competing for divided attention and (2) by ensuring sufficient processing time per object.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUIST 2015 - Adjunct Publication of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages37-38
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9781450337809
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015 Nov 6
Event28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST 2015 - Charlotte, United States
Duration: 2015 Nov 82015 Nov 11

Publication series

NameUIST 2015 - Adjunct Publication of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Conference

Conference28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCharlotte
Period15/11/815/11/11

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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