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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).
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?