%0 Thesis %A Lichtschlag, Leonhard %T Zoomable user interfaces: Communicating on a canvas %I RWTH Aachen %V Dissertation %C Aachen %M RWTH-2016-01159 %P 1 Online-Ressource (xxvii, 216 Seiten) : Illustrationen, Diagramme %D 2015 %Z Veröffentlicht auf dem Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University 2016 %Z Dissertation, RWTH Aachen, 2015 %X Zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) are an interesting alternative to existing interfaces such as overview + detail designs. ZUIs lay out information on a unified information landscape, whereas overview + detail traditionally promotes fragmented information. The choice of interface paradigm not only influences how the information is presented but also how the software affords to be used. Existing studies of ZUIs have three limitations: They often investigate lab scenarios that do not necessarily translate well to usage domain scenarios. Many studies compare different ZUI designs, but do not compare them to an established domain baseline. Also, many studies focus on navigation tasks primarily and learning tasks secondarily, yet we also have to consider authors. On the side of design, ZUIs have an unaddressed problem of integrating textual content. We present a model of author, navigator, and learner to investigate interfaces with. We then study ZUIs and traditional overview + detail user interfaces in two domains: presentation support and integrated development environments (IDEs). In the first, we design a ZUI presentation system, Fly, and find that especially authors explore more creative designs than with existing baseline software, while presenters and learners perform on par with the baseline. In the second domain, we explore three design options to project text to spatial information landscapes: vocabulary based, pattern language based, and hand-drawn sketching based designs. We finally study navigation with sketches compared to a traditional IDE and find it a viable alternative that is strongly adopted by the testers.In summary, we explore the field of ZUIs further and present these contributions: We test ZUIs as the primary metaphor in two practical domains and find them in parts superior to the baseline. We provide studies that underline that one has to study multiple user roles with ZUIs to get a complete image of the benefits in practical applications. Additionally, we show the feasibility to abstract text with sketches, which opens a new design direction for IDEs. %F PUB:(DE-HGF)11 %9 Dissertation / PhD Thesis %U https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/568226