Multiple Monitors Increase Productivity

eggoeater writes "An systematic study conducted by NEC-Mitsubishi, ATI Technologies and the University of Utah has concluded that the use of multiple monitors in the workplace increases productivity. The study is discussed on Tom's Hardware, EE Times, and there's a detailed press release on NEC-Mitsubishi. For those of us who use multi-monitors, this is not shocking. But maybe now that it's official, IT managers will view it as a good investment and not just for gamers."

Comments

What about widescreens...?

[Sodakar]

It's a shame that the study didn't include replacing a standard 4x3 aspect-ratio display with a wide-screen display. In my personal experience, I've found that the extra width is what really helps -- not so much the ability to have two desktops visible at once. Two 17" displays are better than one 17" display, but one 24" widescreen display is even better still. (no break in the middle, consistent color correction across the entire width, great for wide photo-editing, long code that wraps, and of course, ultra-long syslogs)

Of course, two standard displays are far more economical than one widescreen display... :(

Though the results of the study are undoubtedly true, I find it amusing that this study is put on by a display company, graphics company, and a university that most likely got freebies or kickbacks.

News at 7: "Dell Computer, Intel, and UCLA have found that multiple processors can increase productivity."

Re:A single monitor?

[Greyfox]

That's one aspect of Extreme Programming I never liked. Though the Really Extreme Programming (XXXProgramming) where one developer sits on another developer's lap does show some promise...

Re:Any excuse is a good excuse....

[mwood]

Yeah, until some PHB decides that, if 2 monitors = productivity gain, 4 monitors = 2x productivity gain, and I wind up with more monitors than I can attend to. Like the famous Western Electric study where they kept tinkering with the lights until they discovered that the productivity gain came from workers feeling more appreciated because somebody was always coming 'round to adjust the lights, and was not correlated to the experimental parameter at all.

That said, I'm not surprised at this result. One monitor simply can't have eight or ten pages usefully viewable at the same time, which is the way I work when I'm deep in the coding and a major reason that I still prefer paper documents for serious creative work. I've often said that what I need is not an ugrade from 17" to 19" and 1024x768 to 1280x1024, but one to 4'x3' at 10240x7680. (Or VR goggles and gloves that can simulate a wall-sized display and the keyboard to drive it.... :-)

Screen space == short-term memory

[alispguru]

Of course developers are more productive with more screen space. If I can have more windows open at once without overlapping them, I'll spend less time raising/lowering/rearranging them, with less disruption to my thought processes while I'm coding/testing/debugging. More information in front of me with less effort to get it keeps me in flow, which is where I want to be.

I used to have a 17" Apple monitor that I ran at 1600x1200 for development, solely to keep as much text as possible in my field of vision while working. My favorite monitor of all time was a Sun 20" monochrome 100 DPI screen - ran at something like 2000x1500.

Screen space is an extension of my short-term memory - it lets me deal with more complex things with less effort.

It' just bandwidth

[Phat_Tony]

Of course it raises productivity, it raises the most important bandwidth limitation in the whole system: the one between the user & the machine.

Hands using the keyboard & mouse going one way, and eyes watching the monitor going the other way, is a pretty limited interface. (Yeah, I know there are speakers and printers and such, but most of the information channel is keyboard, mouse, monitor.) Not a lot has happened on the keyboard/mouse end to raise input bandwidth since around 1984, but the output bandwith had grown a lot, from hopeless 10" VGA monitors (or TV's) to having things like 2 21" 1600 x 1200 monitors.

Higher monitor resolution (that's total resolution, not just screen density) makes a huge difference in how fast and how well you can obtain and comprehend information from your machine.

The GUI helps with this too- GUI's are just compression algorithms to compress information in order to pump it through the narrow bandwidth of the screen-eye-brain pipeline. It uses more machine resources in order to present things in a manner that lets your brain recognize things faster, because brains are better built for dealing with graphics than text in many ways.

More monitor space also increaeses input by compressing it (or eliminating useless steps)- if you can see more windows at once, you spend less time using your narrow input pipeline to rearrange things, and more time inputing directly where you want.

See Edward Tufte, who is always upset about people tossing out bandwidth in stupid interface design. Notably, he bashes web browsers, which usually use screen space up on
1- the OS's menu bar & other widgets
2- the web browser's menu bar, toolbar, link bar, & other widgets
3- the sites' title bar, ad banner, navigation bar, sidebar, etc.

This often leaves a couple of square inches of screen space to cram in the information on the site you're actually trying to get too, mostly wasting huge portions of your bandwidth, especially on lower resolution monitors, because all the other widgets stay the same size, and it's the content space that shrinks down to the size of a pea.