Column Major Pattern: How Users Process Spatially Fixed Items on Large, Tiled Displays

Large, high-resolution displays demonstrated their effectiveness in lab settings for cognitively demanding tasks in single user and collaborative scenarios. The effectiveness is mostly reached through inherent displays» properties - large display real estate and high resolution - that allow for visualization of complex datasets, and support of group work and embodied interaction. To raise users» efficiency, however, more sophisticated user support in the form of advanced user interfaces might be needed. For that we need profound understanding of how large, tiled displays impact users work and behavior. We need to extract behavioral patterns for different tasks and data types. This paper reports on study results of how users, while working collaboratively, process spatially fixed items on large, tiled displays. The results revealed a recurrent pattern showing that users prefer to process documents column wise rather than row wise or erratic.