C. Ahlberg, B. Shneiderman,
1994. The Alphaslider: A Compact and Rapid Selector, in Proceedings
CHI'94: Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 365-371.
Abstract
Research has suggested that rapid, serial, visual presentation of text (RSVP)
may be an effective way to scan and search through lists of text
strings in search of words, names, etc. The Alphaslider widget employs
RSVP as a method for rapidly scanning and searching lists or menus in
a graphical user interface environment. The Alphaslider only uses an
area less than 7 cm x 2.5 cm. The tiny size of the Alphaslider allows
it to be placed on a credit card, on a control panel for a VCR, or as
a widget in a direct manipulation based database interface. An
experiment was conducted with four Alphaslider designs which showed
that novice Alphaslider users could locate one item in a list of
10,000 film titles in 24 seconds on average, an expert user in about
13 seconds.
Keywords
Alphaslider, widget, selection technology, menus, dynamic queries
