The Intelligent Zoom as metaphor and navigation tool in a multiscreen interface for network control systems

While most supervisory control system interfaces use multiple screens, they lack support for understanding, navigating and manipulating the underlying information space. The authors propose the Intelligent Zoom as a network system metaphor which will provide the needed support. The authors use the zoom as an overview screen, to which additional work screens have been added, but this reintroduces many of the problems which the zoom solved. In this paper the authors explore the issues in designing a two-screen interface which exploits the strength of the zoom as a monitoring and navigation tool.