A/sup 2/DL-an Adaptive Automatic Display Layout system

With advances in computer technology, complex applications are being developed which involve multi-window operations. With the increasing number of windows on the desktop, effective viewing of all the necessary information for a task becomes difficult. A significant portion of the user's time is spent in opening/closing or moving/resizing the windows. Since these window interface housekeeping activities are not directly related to the user's task domain, time spent on window management causes an increase in the actual task completion time, resulting in reduced user throughput. We propose the A/sup 2/DL (Adaptive Automatic Display Layout) system, which performs window management functions to free the user's cognitive and temporal resources to work on task domain activities rather than managing the multi-window desktop. Our system aims to automate and adapt the layout of the windows according to the current user and his current task domain, thereby enhancing the overall human-computer system performance.