Okay, computer. You should know my monitor-switching habits by now.
Most of the time you will see that I have the big monitor plugged in to my laptop. When I do, I have things arranged a certain way. I put my e-mail on the laptop monitor. I tell the Dock to stay visible and not recede into the edge, because I can afford the screen space. I want my palettes in various productivity apps to be arranged so as to make efficient use of the big display while leaving plenty of real estate to do my work. Scrivener and Inspiration need lots of space, so I want them to be maximized on the big screen. I want my instant messaging app to be down on the laptop monitor.
On other occasions, you will notice that the big monitor is not plugged in. It’s just me and a 15″ laptop screen. You see me hide the Dock to free up precious space. Scrivener and Inspiration will still be maximized, but that of course means smaller height and width on the smaller screen. You see palettes in my power tools arranged just so, to make best use of my smaller on-the-go set up.
You see me switch between these two configurations pretty regularly. You should know now how I like things in each case.
So please, when I come and go and switch my workstation around, take care of these details for me so I can concentrate on my work.
This implies that:
- Each application needs to be aware of the various display configurations that are actually in use. And each should keep track of UI layout so it can recreate it automatically when I move about. The first few switches will still require the user to move things about. But the UI will be trainable and it will learn over time. This will save a lot of time diddling around with UI elements every time I move around.
- The Dock should learn (possibly with repetition) that you prefer it to be hidden on small screens and always visible on large screens.
- Treat “maximized” as a special state. When the machine awakens to a smaller display, don’t put a 1900-pixel-wide window on a 1400-pixel-wide laptop display without resizing it. And vice-versa: if a window has been told to be maximized, then make it maximized when moving to a larger display.
- When the configuration changes, put windows in reasonable locations. (In moving to smaller displays, I find many windows stuck along the bottom edge, with only the title bar showing.)
This will also help in the future, when our world is in the cloud, and our workstation is any computer, anywhere. Those workstations can come in any shape and it will behoove the software to arrange the workspace accordingly.
See also:
- Making efficient use of big displays (from almost four years ago)
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. He also writes the Product Vision Blog. To follow him on Twitter click here.
