Image Size vs. Scrolling in Photo Thumbnail Browsers

Authors:

Hilary Browne-hbrowne@cs.umd.edu
Jeff Carver-carver@cs.umd.edu

Abstract

This experiment was designed to investigate the tradeoffs between image size and scrolling in a fixed size window of thumbnail images. The main question was whether people were faster and preferred larger thumbnails with scrolling, or smaller thumbnails without scrolling. Our hypothesis was that for small collections (i.e. 24 photos) there would be no difference in performance time but the no scrolling version would be preferred. For medium sized collections (i.e. 36 photos), we hypothesized that users would be faster and prefer the no scrolling version. For larger collections (i.e. 48 photos), we hypothesized that there would not be a significant time difference between the scrolling and non-scrolling versions, but that users would prefer the scrolling version. The results confirmed our hypotheses about speed. For the medium sized collection, the non-scrolling version was significantly faster, and there was no significant difference in speed with the small and large collections. However, the results did not confirm all of our hypotheses about preference. For the medium and large collections, the users preferred the larger thumbnails with scrolling. No significant preference was given for the small collections.

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