Date of Award

11-16-2004

Document Type

Thesis open access

Department

Computer Science

Abstract

The problem of dealing with representations of information that does not fit conveniently within allotted screen space is pervasive in graphical interfaces. While there are techniques for dealing with this problem in various ways, some properties of such existing techniques are not satisfying. For example, global structure of information may be lost in favor of local focus, or information may not be mapped into a rectangular area. The 1-hyperbolic interface is proposed to deal with some of these deficiencies, and the mathematics involved in display and interaction are derived. The calculations necessary for this interface are easy to implement, and can run reasonably even on slow devices. A fully functional prototype for displaying tree structures has been developed to compare the effects of this new interface to those of a standard interface. The results of usability experiments conducted with this prototype are also presented and analyzed.

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