Do Big Screens Make Employees More Productive?

prostoalex writes "If your company uses 17" or 19" monitors, 30" monitors will make the employees more productive, Apple-sponsored research says. MacWorld reports: "Pfeiffer's testing showed time savings of 13.63 seconds when moving files between folders using the larger screen — 15.7 seconds compared to 29.3 seconds on the 17-in. monitor — for a productivity gain of 46.45 percent. The testing showed a 65.09 percent productivity gain when dragging and dropping between images — a task that took 6.4 seconds on the larger monitor compared to 18.3 seconds using the smaller screen. And cutting and pasting cells from Excel spreadsheets resulted in a 51.31 percent productivity gain — a task that took 20.7 seconds on the larger monitor versus 42.6 seconds on the smaller screen."" Calling such task-specific speed jolts "productivity gains" seems optimistic unless some measure of overall producivity backs up that claim, but don't mention that on the purchase order request.

Comments

why not dual or triple displays?

[Kartoffel]

I certainly feel more productive on dual screens vs. a single display.

LCDs are also more productive than CRTs, because they free up more desk space for heaping junk, err... I meant, organizing my work.

Re:Answer is

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I just wanted to chime in because I think you've got two of them reversed. Where I work, the 3D guys have two monitors and the 2D guys have 30" single monitors. The reason for this is that a 3D app requires having several other apps open. For example, I typically have Photoshop open on one monitor while I have Maya open in the other. I need to be able to get back and forth between them without a lot of minimizing/maximizing. The 2D guys have 30" monitors (Apple, btw.) that run at a very high resolution so they can see all of the pixels they possibly can while they're painting. (It's not uncommon for their paintings to be several thousand pixels wide.) In their case, they rarely have to have more than one app open. I'm more productive with the two smaller monitors and the other department's more productive with the ginormous screen.