GroupBar: The TaskBar Evolved

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GroupBar The TaskBar Evolved

• Greg Smith, Patrick Baudisch, George Robertson,
  Mary Czerwinski, Brian Meyers, Daniel Robbins,
  and Donna Andrews
• Microsoft Research

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Key Problem Task Switching

• Bannon et al. (1983) information workers often
  switch between concurrent tasks
• Rooms (Card Henderson, 1987)
• Working sets of windows
• Large displays multimon lead to more open
  windows (4 gt 12 gt 16)
• Interruptions lead to more task switching

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Windows TaskBar Problems

• TaskBar does not support task switching
• Many operations required to make a switch
• TaskBar does not scale well
• Grouping by application rather than task
• Hypothesis
• Movement, switching, layout primitives at
  multi-window level can save time and effort

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Related Work
Rooms Overview (1987)

• Virtual Desktop Managers
• Smalltalk Project Views
• Rooms
• X-Windows
• BeOS workspaces
• Linux KDE desktops, etc.
• Win32 ISV products XDesk, GoScreen, Flash
  Desktops, DesksAtWill, etc.
• (not yet built into Windows)

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Related Work
Zooming (Pad)
3D (Task Gallery)
Tiled (Elastic Windows)
Time-Machine Computing
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GroupBar Design Points

• Familiar build on Windows TaskBar
• Non-modal not separate desktops
• Lightweight UI low-effort group creation and
  management
• Leverage spatial memory allow users to place
  tiles and groups for quicker recall

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Demo
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GroupBar Basics

• Bar on any desktop edge
• Resizable, auto-hide, always-on-top options
• Multiple bars
• One tile for each window

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Arranging Tiles

• Drag tiles within bar to reorder
• Drag tiles between bars for greater spatial
  separation

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Grouping Tiles (Main Theme)

• Drag tile onto another tile to create group
• Drag tile in/out to add/remove from group
• Drag one of the last two tiles out to destroy
  group

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Dragging Subtleties

• Move caret is straight
• Insertion caret is curved toward group target
• Target position decoupled from caret symbol to
  aid in target acquisition

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Group Appearance

• Groups indicated by
• Subtle tile shape change
• Colored background frame
• Green group button

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Group Operations

• Group button now offers a control surface
• Click once to restore all
• Click once to minimize all
• Right-click for additional group operations

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Additional Group Operations

• Analogous to Window operations
• Layout templates
• Depend on display configuration
• Might depend on actual windows (not implemented)

Window Menu
Group Menu
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Overflow Strategies

• TaskBar
• Collapse by app
• Multiple rows of tiles, buttons to page

• GroupBar
• Collapse by group
• Multiple bars

Windows paging buttons
GroupBar collapsed group
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Longitudinal User Study

• 5 participants
• 7-10 day study on their own work
• Goal initial understanding if users will use
  grouping for real work

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Results

• Users did use grouping
• Average 2.5 groups of 2 windows
• Satisfaction ratings generally favorable
• Useful to drag to group
• Useful to close all windows in group at once
• Useful to remember layout
• Makes multiple monitors more useful

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Results (cont.)

• Negative satisfaction ratings for
• More than one GroupBar at a time
• Non-group windows minimize on group switch
• 2 of 5 participants continued using GroupBar
  after study

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Comparative User Study

• Comparing TaskBar and GroupBar
• 18 participants
• 3 tasks consisting of 2-3 documents each
• Planned interruptions forced 5 task switches
• Triple monitor setup (3840 x 1024)

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Results

• Borderline significanttask time advantage
• 11.7 min vs 13.25 min
• Satisfaction ratings significantly favor GB
• GB unanimously preferred

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Future Work

• Iterative design improvements
• Further studies for different display
  configurations and user tasks
• Layout templates based on window use
• Automatic grouping based on window use
• Persistence

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Conclusions Met Design Goals

• GroupBar provides basic task management
• Easy to group windows with drag and drop
• Single click task switching
• Tasks shown with subtle extension to familiar
  Windows TaskBar
• Demonstrated ease of use, learnability, and user
  acceptance