ZUI
An acronym for Zoomable User Interface.General Information
The basic idea is to have a map of the represented information and allow the user to zoom in and out. A zoomable interface has a relatively high information density. In fact, zoomed all the way out from the dataset, all of the information is visible and modifiable (not necessarily in a usable fashion).
Advantages:
- Spatial navigation
- Natural hierarchy (nested objects)
- High information density (needs strong visual cues to not turn into a disadvantage)
- Visual pattern recognition (with a well-designed GUI)
- High visibility when zoomed out
Disadvantages:
- Tunnel vision (only documents spatially close to each other visible at the same time, might be helpful to have sticky documents or another view; map)
- Probably high amount of resources needed to work on the datasets (all documents on a terabyte RAID visible at once, needs LOD)
- High amount of repetitive navigation work, though usually less than with WIMP Explorer-style file managers
- Pad++ Zoomable Interface;
- Piccolo & Jazz web site a Java implementation of Pad++;
- Denim demo for PC/mac;
- 2GoTo.com an infinite Plane Fly-through ZUI, flash 100k, imports content from independent servers, works on phones/handhelds/PCs/macs;
- Jef Raskin - ZUI Demo: zooming is an important part of The Humane Environment;
- CounterPoint A zooming presentation tool;
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