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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.
Apple should refer to Amdahl's Law to see that a 50% speedup of something that only accounts for 1% of your overall time really ain't that big of a deal!
I ran one monitor at work for a long time (17" - the head IT guy keeps rejecting my request for a 19"). They won't let me put a second video card in my computer, so I threw up a linux box and use X2VNC between them and now I have twice the usable space and I am much more productive, especially when coding or doing trouble tickets. I spend way less time alt-tabbing around looking for my terminal sessions - they're all on one monitor, as well as my browser, etc, leaving my 'work' tools on the other so I can move between easily.
The downsides I see are a) cost and b) people getting a 30" monitor, complaining they can't see anything, and running 800x600. I think that would break my heart and mind a little, but it wouldn't suprise me. People around here still run 800x600 on their 17" monitors, and complain that 1280x1024 is too small.
But, now that I think about it, having a 30" monitor wouldn't necessarily help - when you maximize a window, it fills the whole screen, which still puts you back to alt-tabbing. Maybe a better window manager/gui that you could break the screen in to regions, so that when you maximize a window, it would only fill the top 40% or something. Or the ability to pin windows to a location, os you don't have to maximize them.
I think my point is that more screen real-estate, be it one huge monitor, or 2 (or 3 as I sometimes setup) is very much more useful.
God, I babble a lot.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Two 19" monitors will give you the same flexibility, at a much lower cost point - AND you can angle each viewing area separately. You can't do that with a single screen.
BTW, twin 19" screens are my setup at both home and the office (the home box is set with xinerama off, the work box with it on).
First, I find 2 or even 3 17-19 inch screens are better than one big one.
In terms of productivity there is a noticeable difference when I work in our lab with one monitor versus at my desk with 2. Especially when debugging code.
For me, however, the savings is more in paper than anything. I used to print requirements, interface documents, reference material, etc. Now with 2 monitors I can maximize the document I need on 1 screen then do the design/code stuff on the other. I have substantially reduced my paper consumption as well as other office supplies like highliters, pens, etc.
Using one large monitor is a lot better than using two smaller ones. You have a lot more flexibility than with two; you can split it into two uneven parts, or three different sections more easily. I often have code I'm writing, documentation I'm writing, and documentation I'm reading open, for example. Two things really help:
- Exposé. Switching windows quickly without it is a pain. It isn't needed as much on larger screens though.
- The zoom button working correctly on OS X. I don't ever want a window to take up the entire screen. If I did, I wouldn't bother with a multitasking GUI. I want it to grow to the optimal size to contain the contents.
I am a bit surprised that this comes from Apple, because one area where OS X scales badly in terms of screen size is the menu bar. OPENSTEP managed much better here by having the right mouse button pop up the application menu under the mouse wherever you were, making invoking the menu an O(1) operation (rather than O(n) in terms of screen height on OS X).I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I used to use 2 monitors all the time, I greatly preferred it to
a single large montior for exactly that reason.. also I often
need to use a virtual desktop to configure a server or the like
where anything other than maximised is a massive pain to work with.
However, I've recently switched to a triple monitor setup, and its
far superior to dual monitor. There is a large psychological benefit
to having a single central screen for whatever it is you are meant
to be concentrating on and then having documentation/emails/IM/remote desktops
or low priority tasks switched to the sides.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I spend about a hundred hours a month programming an access database for my company. It "HAS TO" have a slick looking front end, which will all know is super easy in Access... I got them to spring for a 20.1 in Monitor and it's great but now I'm beggin for a second so I can have the source code on one screen and the front end on the other. I guarenteed you will all the Alt+Tabbing I have to do, I'll save at least an hour a week. For the little these things cost in the long run, you would have to be pretty Draconian to actuall want to break it down into dollars and sense, it should just be common sense. Common sense also dictates Ronda from the office pool doesn need a 24 inch screen to view e-mail and print reports. A 23 inch will do just fine.....
Well that's nice. I'm sick of hearing about how maximised windows are stupid and useless, and how I just don't understand. People who still say that never seem to imagine this scenario: I'm about to do some programming for a few hours. I don't want to see anything else while I do that, so I'd rather I get to maximise, e.g. Visual Studio and block out everything else. But according to these people, I should not maximise my window, but leave other apps visible so I can drag and drop between them, or just not use the whole screen area because it in some way offends their sensibilities. (Newsflash to these geniuses: you can still drag and drop to other apps from a maximised app - try hovering over the Windows task bar while dragging sometime).
But then, some people can't bear the fact that the way they work might not be the super optimal best way of working for everyone else, and so decide not to accept it. Personally, I use Windows on a two monitor system (which I find does help my productivity compared to a single monitor, thanks), maximise apps often, and use Alt-Tab to context switch, often so fast that people watching can't follow what I'm doing. Is the best way for my Dad to work? Probably not. Sure, I'll point out alternative working models to people, but that doesn't mean it's easiest for them. The Mac desktop model usually drives me mad, with hard drives/CDs hiding behind all the other windows, etc., but lots of Mac users love it. So what? People are different. Film at 11.
Me no understand.
Fitt's Law:
Surely this explicitly takes into account the menu bar being waaay over there? Or have I misunderstood?