The Alphaslider: A Compact and Rapid Selector

View/ Open
Date
1998-10-15Author
Ahlberg, Christopher
Shneiderman, Ben
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Research has suggested that rapid, serial, visual presentation of text
(RSVP) may be an effective way to scan and search through lists of text
strings in search of words, names, etc. The Alphaslider widget employs
RSVP as a method for rapidly scanning and searching lists or menus in a
graphical user interface environment. The Alphaslider only uses an area
less than 7 x 2.5 cm2. The tiny size of the Alphaslider allows it to be
placed on a credit card, on a control panel for a VCR, or as a widget in a
direct manipulation based database interface. An experiment was
conducted with four Alphaslider designs which showed that novice
Alphaslider users could locate one item in a list of 10,000 film titles in
24 seconds on average, an expert user in about 13 seconds.
(Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-684)
(Also cross-referenced as ISR-TR-93-72)