by Lou Schwartz, Valérie Maquil and Mohammad Ghoniem (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology)
Wall-sized displays (WSDs) are large interactive displays with specificities to consider when designing applications for them, but there is no standard or guidelines to support designers. Therefore, we organised a focus group with nine researchers to identify the main challenges encountered during the design of collaborative problem-solving applications for WSDs.
WSDs are large interactive displays increasingly used in various fields in the public space (to display contextual information, entertainment or artistic purposes) but also to support design and collaborative decision-making (i.e. in the fields of automotive design, architecture, traffic management, surgical flow management, ICU data and product design). Such displays “create a coherent physical view space that is at least of the size of the human body and exhibits a significantly higher resolution than a conventional display.”[1]. Their configurations vary in terms of size, orientation, visualisation technology, display setup, means of interaction, fields of application and location [2]. But such diversity complicates the design of applications for WSDs. Therefore, to better understand the challenges of designing for WSDs and to complete previous work [1,3], we organised a focus group with nine researchers. These researchers mainly worked on the design of applications and interactions for WSDs.
The participants had different expertise levels in the design of such applications for WSDs, from beginner to experienced. The purpose of their designed applications included collaborative decision-making support systems, complex data visualisation, popularising science for young people in a science museum, studying the decision to cross the road in front of autonomous vehicles, and visualisation of data from a building model from several views. They covered different targeted areas: 4D in architecture, logistics in times of crisis, engineering, energy communities, autonomous vehicles, and scientific dissemination. From the discussions, nine categories of challenges emerged.
“More interactions” refers to the challenges arising from the combination of several interaction methods (i.e. gestural, touch, tablets, sensors, etc.). It deals with minimising the use of equipment while ensuring the robustness of the system to modify data, texts, and models directly on the WSD, to manage role-specific interactions and to identify the author of the action.
“More users” refers to challenges concerning the management of occlusions, the competition between users, and new collaborative interactions for a task (i.e. drag and drop carried out collaboratively by people located at either end of the WSD). It further concerns managing large groups (more than ten people) including dealing with social dynamics and different roles, bringing together different people with different areas or levels of expertise with different information and format needs, managing personal spaces and information sharing in the common space.
“More space around” refers to the size of the room in proportion to the size of the WSD and of the targeted group. It deals with the management of the physical fatigue induced by moving along the screen, and by moving back and forth to get an overview or interact. It also includes managing the physical space by providing furniture if necessary, adjusting light conditions, and ensuring that all information is legible from everywhere.
“Different durations of use” are observed depending on the purpose of the WSD. Public WSDs are used during short interaction sessions, and grabbing the attention of passers-by is important. But problem-solving sessions can last a long time (between 30 minutes and 4 hours), and in this case, it is important to manage interruptions, and sequential work by several groups, by saving and reloading a session, for instance.
“More complex content” is related to defining the needed information and how it should be displayed to provide the right level of information for all the people present. Displays need to be adapted to their work habits, with content being organised into zones, depending on their impact (main, secondary and detail information). Important content should be emphasised, and, in the case of representations of the same content, modifications need to be shown everywhere. Finally, this challenge also concerns the management of the users’ mental workload.
“More devices” is related to the several screens that a WSD can be composed of, but also to all the other devices that can be used to complete the WSD setup (i.e. supplementary display, interactive tabletop, personal devices, sensors, etc.). This raises concerns about the synchronisation of all the devices and their integration in the users’ workflow.
“More space on the display” refers to the management of the size of the WSD (too high or too low will leave certain areas inaccessible), and how the main information can be placed while defining comfortable, accessible and useful zones on the display. This challenge concerns also the layout management and the on-the-fly layout adaptations.
“Assist designers” regroups the lack of guidelines, prototyping tools, and best practices in design and testing. Accessing real data during the design process, recruiting users with the right expert profile and access to the equipment, can be complicated (not available, not already built or too far away).
“Other” challenges concern the compatibility (no standard in terms of WSD characteristics, the most appropriate configuration for each situation and difficulty to use existing software on a WSD). But also, the management of the workflow for complex tasks, and the accessibility for specific audiences (i.e. children, elderly people or people with disabilities).
To conclude, it is difficult to make the right choice when designing applications for WSDs. There is a lack of tools and methods adapted to WSDs, that take into account their the nine challenges explained above. More research is needed to better explore these challenges but also to propose solutions to address them.
Figure 1: Nine challenges encountered in the field when designing for wall-sized displays (WSDs), resulting from a focus group with nine researchers working on the design of applications and interactions for WSDs for collaborative decision support and collaborative visualisation of complex data on two devices: a concave wall and a vertical wall, which can be complemented by a touch table, a tangible table or other displays.
References:
[1] I. Belkacem et al., “Interactive visualisation on large high-resolution displays: A survey,” 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2212.04346.
[2] C. Ardito et al., “Interaction with large displays: A survey,” ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 47, no. 3, Article 46, Feb. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1145/2682623.
[3] L. Lischke et al., “Challenges in designing interfaces for large displays : The practitioners’ point of view,” in Proc. of NordiCHI ’20, ACM, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3421240.
Please contact:
Lou Schwartz, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg
