collapse-to-zoom

The user collapses the right column using a drag gesture. When lifting the pen, the column will be replaced by a thin placeholder and the freed space will be used to render the rest of the page in a higher scale.

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Overview visualizations for small-screen web browsers were designed to provide users with visual context and to allow them to rapidly zoom in on tiles of relevant content. Given that content in the overview is reduced, however, users are often unable to tell which tiles hold the relevant material, which can force them to adopt a time-consuming hunt-and-peck strategy. Collapse-to-zoom addresses this issue by offering an alternative exploration strategy. In addition to allowing users to zoom into relevant areas, collapse-to-zoom allows users to collapse areas deemed irrelevant, such as columns containing menus, archive material, or advertising. Collapsing content causes all remaining content to expand in size causing it to reveal more detail, which increases the user’s chance of identifying relevant content. Collapse-to-zoom navigation is based on a hybrid between a marquee selection tool and a marking menu, called marquee menu. It offers four commands for collapsing content areas at different granularities and to switch to a full-size reading view of what is left of the page.
 

Baudisch, P., Xie, X., Wang, C., and Ma, W.-Y. Collapse-to-Zoom: Viewing Web Pages on Small Screen Devices by Interactively Removing Irrelevant Content. In Proceedings of UIST 2004 (technote), Santa Fee, MN, Nov 2004, pp. 91-94. PDF (0.6M) | PPT (1.3M) | AVI (40M) | citations

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Project in collaboration with Xing Xie and Chong Wang, MSR Asia