On the effectiveness of Overview+Detail visualization on mobile devices

Overview+Detail visualization is one of the major approaches to the display of large information spaces on a computer screen. Widely used in desktop applications, its feasibility on mobile devices has been scarcely investigated. This paper first provides a detailed analysis of the literature on Overview+Detail visualization, discussing and comparing the results of desktop and mobile studies to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the approach. The analysis reveals open issues worthy of additional investigation and can provide useful indications to interface designers. Then, the paper presents an experiment that studies unexplored aspects of the design space for mobile interfaces based on the Overview+Detail approach, investigating the effect of letting users manipulate the overview to navigate maps and the effect of highlighting possible objects of interest in the overview to support search tasks. Results of the experiment suggest that both direct manipulation of the overview and highlighting objects of interest in the overview have a positive effect on user performance in terms of the time to complete search tasks on mobile devices, but do not provide specific advantages in terms of recall of the spatial configuration of targets.