George W. Furnas’s scientific contributions

Introduction to HITS: Human Interface Tool Suite, in Intelligent User Interfaces, (Sullivan & Tyler, Eds.), 1991, pp. 293-337. [15] James D. Hollan and Scott Stornetta, Beyond Being There, Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI'92, pp. 119-125. (also appeared as a chapter in Readings in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Becker, Ed.), 1993, 842-848. [16] Mackinlay, J.D., Robertson, G.G. and Card, S.K., The perspective wall: detail and context smoothly integrated. In Proceedings of CHI'91 Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM press, 173-179. [17] John K. Ousterhout, Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Addison Wesley, 1994. [18] Ken Perlin and David Fox. Pad: An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Proceedings of 1993 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, 57-64. [19] Maureen C. Stone, Ken Fishkin, and Eric A. Bier. The Movable Filter as a User Interface Tool, to appear in Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI'94. [20] Ivan E. Sutherland. Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications systems, Procee

Introduction to HITS: Human Interface Tool Suite, in Intelligent User Interfaces, (Sullivan & Tyler, Eds.), 1991, pp. 293-337. [15] James D. Hollan and Scott Stornetta, Beyond Being There, Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI'92, pp. 119-125. (also appeared as a chapter in Readings in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Becker, Ed.), 1993, 842-848. [16] Mackinlay, J.D., Robertson, G.G. and Card, S.K., The perspective wall: detail and context smoothly integrated. In Proceedings of CHI'91 Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM press, 173-179. [17] John K. Ousterhout, Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Addison Wesley, 1994. [18] Ken Perlin and David Fox. Pad: An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Proceedings of 1993 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, 57-64. [19] Maureen C. Stone, Ken Fishkin, and Eric A. Bier. The Movable Filter as a User Interface Tool, to appear in Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI'94. [2

We describe Pad++, a zoomable graphical sketchpad that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based interfaces. We discuss the motivation for Pad++, describe the implementation and present prototype applications. In addition, we introduce an informational physics strategy for interface design and briefly contrast it with current design strategies. We envision a rich world of dynamic persistent informational entities that operate according to multiple physics specifically designed to provide cognitively facile access and serve as the basis for the design of new computationally-based work materials.

Big information worlds cause big problems for interfaces. There is too much to see. They are hard to navigate. An armada of techniques has been proposed to present the many scales of information needed. Space-scale diagrams provide a framework for much of this work. By represent- ing both a spatial world and its different magnifications explicitly, the diagrams allow the direct visualization and analysis of important scale related issues for interfaces.

When making a choice in the absence of decisive first-hand knowledge, choosing as other like-minded, similarly-situated people have successfully chosen in the past is a good strategy - in effect, using other people as filters and guides: filters to strain out potentially bad choices and guides to point out potentially good choices. Current human-computer interfaces largely ignore the power of the social strategy. For most choices within an interface, new users are left to fend for themselves and if necessary, to pursue help outside of the interface. We present a general history-of-use method that automates a social method for informing choice and report on how it fares in the context of a fielded test case: the selection of videos from a large set. The positive results show that communal history-of-use data can serve as a powerful resource for use in interfaces.