The redesigned interface uses a strip of thumbnails to provide an interactive overview of the poster's display sequence.

The original poster interface.

Plasma Posters are large-screen, digital, interactive posterboards for informal content sharing within teams, groups, organizations, and communities. Leveraging the fact that the physical world is often used as a canvas for asynchronous information exchange via paper fliers and posters, the Plasma Posters provide a platform for sharing interactive digital content in public places.

The initial design was based on fieldwork that addressed the use of paper tacked on walls in organizations, local community centers, and cafes to communicate, advertise, and display personal items of interest. Usage data and user interview/survey results from the first six months of deployment were used to redesign the Plasma Poster user-interfaces and implement new features that improved and stabilized the system.

In addition to simplifying the implementation (which is now represented as a single Web page and style sheet) and simplifying the over-all look and feel, Jonathan Helfman led the effort to extend the interface with an interactive strip of thumbnails of posted content. The thumbnail strip shows items that have recently been on view (to the left of center), the current item (in the center), and items that are about to come on view (to the right of center). Readers may select any thumbnail to display the associated posting. The thumbnail strip is also scrollable: a reader may select anywhere on the strip and flick their finger left or right to reveal other items in the presentation sequence.

The thumbnail strip serves several purposes at once: 1) it provides an interactive overview of the posting sequence, 2) it animates to indicate that the currently-displayed posting is about to change, and 3) it provides a convenient method for returning to the previously-displayed posting.

Qualitative and quantitative data collected over 14 months of use demonstrate a clear peak of interest in April 2003, just after the introduction of the new user interface. There was also a corresponding steady decline in the use of the "Show All" button in favor of browsing the postings using the strip of scrolling thumbnails.

Interactions at the Plasma posters over 14 months, delimited by the introduction of the final major user interface revision installed on March 31, 2003.

Copyright © 2002,2003 Jonathan Helfman