Browsing thumbnails: a comparison of three techniques

We conducted a usability study comparing three different browser alternatives (iconic, zoom-and-pan, and fisheye) for an electronic bulletin board containing thumbnails of notes. The iconic browser behaves in the manner of a standard windowing system. The zoom-and-pan browser allows the user to pan over a note and zoom to a readable size. The fisheye browser was an implementation of the bifocal view. We conducted an experiment where 21 subjects performed browsing tasks with each browser. We found that users performed best with the iconic browser and that young people (20-25) were significantly faster than older (31-53).