The cost of display switching

Abstract

Attaching a large external display can help a mobile device user view more content at once. This paper reports on a study investigating how different configurations of input and output across displays affect performance, subjective workload and preferences in map, text and photo search tasks. Experimental results show that a hybrid configuration where visual output is distributed across displays is worst or equivalent to worst in all tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best in text and photo search tasks (tied with a mobile-only configuration). After conducting a detailed analysis of the performance differences across different UI configurations, we give recommendations for the design of distributed user interfaces.