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

Depending on what you're doing, yes...

[evilduckie]

One of my clients, involved in cartography (making maps), showed me his brand new 30" screen and said he had upgraded from 20" because on one single project, he was losing about 25% of his time scrolling around. So I'd have to say it not only made him more productive, but it also eventually paid for itself.

Re:Answer is

[CastrTroy]

It only helps to have 2 monitors rather than 1 large monitor because the window managers handle 2 monitors much better than 1 large monitor. The maximize feature becomes useless if you're using a 30 inch monitor. Maybe we need new window managers to take advantage of the larger screens. I think the fact that they used Macintosh machines definitely changes the results, because the maximize button doesn't really maximize. WHich makes a lot of sense if you have a 23 inch apple cinema display, but doesn't make much sense if you use a 17 4:3 resolution monitor.

Re:Answer is

[twistedsymphony]

I think it really depends on the task you doing. For instance:

Dual Monitors:

• Programing/Coding
• some forms of 2D Graphics
• Stock trading
• database development/management
• some forms of word processing
• General Multi Tasking

Basically any scenario where you're doing a lot of side by side comparisons, moving data from one place to another or Channing something on one end and watching the results somewhere else. Multi monitors helps keep you from constantly switching between things.

One Large Monitor

• 3D Graphics
• Gaming
• Media (movies/slide shows etc.)
• Some forms of word processing
• some forms of 2D Graphics
• CAD solidmodeling/drawing

Basically any scenario where you need to do a lot of comparisons of the same object on both a large scale and a small scale, or just getting a large view of something that fills your vision. Any scenario where you're constantly zooming in and zooming out will benefit from a single large monitor by allowing you to leave it mostly zoomed in and using your eyes to move around or change focus to the whole picture instead of your mouse. Games and media benefit from this due to giving you a good immersive feel by filling your vision.

There are other scenarios, and hybrid scenarios: like the gamer who keeps an IM client and stock ticker open or the person who likes to play a movie in the background while they do other work. But the type of display that works "best" changes depending on what you're using it for. Perhaps the best universal scenario would be a 30" main display with a 19" secondary.

I would definitely agree that there's a point of being too big, but I don't think you could associate an actual size with it. 30" might be too big if you're only sitting 20" from it Similarly I've got a projector in my basement that's got a 114" image but I can comfortably use that from my couch 180" away. So size is relative to how far away you're set from the screen.