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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.
"Do Big Screens Make Employees More Productive?"
yes.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
30" screens will also make Apple a lot more money. Funny how that works out.
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.
It seems to me the problem could be just as well solved with a higher resolution on the current monitor. I don't really trust the research, since Apple, you know, makes behemoths of display technology.
The time I need to type mv file /some/new/destination/ may depend on the size of the keyboard, but surely not on the size of the screen.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...what you all think regarding whether it's truly a jump in productivity or not.
*copies link, sends to boss.*
Sure, I'll agree that big screens can make one more productive. In fact I'd rather have two big monitors than one attached to my machine. More real estate is a good thing.
But the given example, of dragging and dropping files, has got to be the stupidest thing I've read today, and I'm already at work.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
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!
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.
This way productivity will go down, because it adds the time needed to circumvent the ban to the time used to browse Slashdot!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I spit on this male-sponsored study. Size doesn't matter...it's what you do with it that counts.
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
would make sneakily watching porn a lot more worthwhile.
Summation 2
Double the size makes quadruple the cost when it comes to LCD's.
Indeed, that is why I preffered to get 2 17in LCDs instead of one 23. From my perspective I got more "desktop" state for less cash. And also, I can use one screen to show the Running program while the other is holing the IDE or run one program completely maximized and while the other screen has the small apps (winamp, browser, etc etc).
One question I have always asked myself is how does the multiple screen setup works on the multi-desktop environments like X-window? does each virutal desktop expands to the second screen? I have not been able to use multiple monitors setup on my Linux distro so thats why I have not tested it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
A GUI is not a suitable environment for everything guys - I've seen so many people stuff about clicking everywhere and sorting by extension when they could just use a very simple command to move things in up to one tenth of the time. Computers are there to do the heavy lifting for us if we just tell them the rules. There are a lot of good uses for big screens and multiple screens - but a glass typewriter version of a filing cabinet is given as the example?
Anybody that takes 29.3 to do a file-copy operation needs treatment for their Parkinson's disease, NOT a bigger monitor.
Higher DPI on a given size monitor just makes the pixels smaller, meaning that each character's glyph contains more pixels. This makes the text sharper, but it doesn't increase the amount of useful work area unless the user has visual acuity significantly above the median.
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.
...on the work your doing, and if it can be partitioned into multiple spaces efficiently. CAD work, it turned out for me, wasn't any more efficient on two screens, but was more efficient on a large widescreen. Since the tools take up a small portion of the screen, a second monitor was mostly unused (unless you count a calendar and email program constantly viewable as useful). A single, large monitor means more drawing data available / more detail shown on the screen, and reduces zooming and panning for operations. If I could drive a 30" from my laptop, I might buy one. I use a 24" WS 'cause it matches my current laptop resolution (seamless transition from work to road use), and it wasn't insanely expensive (30"ers were over $2.5k when I got the 24).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I have spent four-five hours trying to get 2 screens hooked up to my linux system. So far no luck. So I figure I'll spend at least 2 more hours.
I have the 2 screens but so far I haven't been any more productive.
The screen with "Check Signal Cable" bouncing around, isn't really doing me any good right now.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
How many times have you seen a computer user who is constantly picking and clicking with their mouse to do the simplest of tasks? I've seen veteran users select text from where the cursor is to the end of the line with the mouse, then click Edit then Cut, then click the point in the document where they want to paste the text, then click Edit then Paste. Shift-End, Ctrl-X, Click at insertion, Ctrl-V would have saved even the fastest mouse-jockey 15-20 seconds on a very common action. There are hundreds of shortcuts - just learning a dozen will save several minutes in a typical day.
Different tasks require different screen real estate, and sometimes bigger is better. But for office app productivity, the low hanging fruit is training.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Expanding on Mr. McD's comment:
What you say is true in Microsoft Windows. But since Mac OS 6 or earlier, the zoom button on a Mac expands the window to the smaller of the size of the document and the size of the screen. If your document is 80en wide, as much source code is, the window won't get wider than 80en plus window decorations if your source code editor follows the applicable interface guidelines.
*at least here in the US
I'm actually in a situation at home where I can compare both side-by-side. I have a PC with XP on it running two 20" wide-screen LCD panels, and across the room, I have a new Mac Pro with a Dell 24" LCD display. (Ok, granted, not quite a 30" like they use in this study ... but should be close enough for the purpose.)
Despite having 40" of total space on one system, vs. only 24" on the other, I *still* prefer the single 24" display, all things considered.
The fact that you can angle each viewing area separately is more of a nuisance than a benefit, IMHO. I'm always finding one of the displays gets bumped so it's not sitting right up against the other one, and the gap between screens is distracting. I also find that with dual displays, I tend to want to angle them just slightly inward so they have a slight "wrapping around my viewing area" effect, rather than looking straight on at both of them. But again, that always seems to get bumped out of place if someone wants to play with the controls on one of the panels or whatever.
With dual displays, I'd also be happier if games would start making use of them. As it is, I don't think I've ever gotten a piece of software other than MS Flight Simulator to take advantage of dual monitors. (I recall seeing somebody's instructions for making Quake 3 use dual monitors for a wide-aspect game spanning both of them - but it required software rendering, which made it horribly slow.)
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
I have one monitor attached to my RHEL4 box, where I use KDevelop, etc for writing php code.
The other monitor is attached to a low-powered windows box useful for thunderbird/firefox/internet explorer (have to check my webpages).
One mouse and keyboard: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Sure, you can't drag windows from one platform to the other, but copy/paste works and you can share mouse/keyboard.
That's the most productive I've ever been, two 19" crts at 1600x1200. Now I just have to wait for 19" LCDs to get that kind of dot pitch.
SHUT UP! Everybody just SHUT UP! This is NOT the time to examine or question these results! This is the time to show your boss this scientific, scholarly article and get him to decide to give you a great honking big expensive Apple screen!
Now Sshhh! Sshhh! Quiet.
Print. Walk to office, walk through door, show boss article, exit through door, walk back to desk, sit down, go back to reading slashdot.
The article has things oversimplified. It's not a larger monitor that makes you more productive. It's more real estate that makes you more productive. With that 30 inch monitor came a higher resolution. A 30 inch monitor at 800x600 is not much more productive than a 15 incher.
A larger monitor is easier on the eyes, and if it's easier on the eyes, you can make the resolution higher, thus gaining more real estate and being able to put more windows on your screen.
Dual monitors always increase real estate so it's easy to see how they increase productivity. Getting a larger monitor doesn't always increase productivity unless it includes an increase in resolution.
Once again this proves that it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Err ...
So you're saying that in an IT department with 5 employees, if I fire one of them and give the remaining four dual monitors, we'll get the same amount of work done without any added overtime?
-Graham
Yeah, and when you need to select 25 of 100 non-consecutive JPEG files from a folder to copy I'm sure you always use the command line instead of ctrl-click and drag.
All single-monitor setups are for dweebs! I have a single 19" panel at work, and three 20" (1600x1200) Panels at home (soon to be my place of work): "trio20x" I have 5.7 million pixels ever before me, and yes, the productivity boost is worth it. The only disappointment is that my fish screen saver will only work on one monitor at a time. :-(
Other interesting monstrocities from the same company:
"trio-ultraHD"
"powerscape-ultraHD"
"arena24s"
One piece I think people skip over is the benefit from rotating certain monitors to be oriented vertically. Most non-media-related computing tasks rely more on the y-axis (emails, code, web pages.); being able to see 100+ lines of code on the screen lets you have a lot more context.
In addition, it helps to be able to maximize multiple windows rather than have one giant screen space and to have to manually resize (or use the clumsy tile windows capability.) If I had one 30" monitor it would drive me nuts; instead I have 3 20" Dell LCDs both at home and at work and it makes a huge difference to be able to maximize two windows on the left and center monitors and to leave the right monitor for email/IM/VMs. (I also usually have about 40-50 windows open at once, which some find strange -- a bunch of python shells, Komodo, Visual Studio, VMware, remote desktop, other text editors and tools, skype, AIM, winamp, photoshop, etc.)
The actually productivity boost comes from not needing to alt-tab, and thus avoiding the concomitant mental context switches; it's great to be able to look at a google search or API reference on one window while actually writing code instead of flipping back and forth and back and forth.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Which is the standard answer, yet still utterly useless if the files in question have no particular common structure to their names. Under those circumstances, the GUI approach is vastly more powerful than the command line one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Of course it would make me more productive, the bigger the screen, the more terminals i can use at the same time! ;)
When I saw a user with all of their windows maximized, I used to think that they were probably a novice user (or perpetual novice). Most non-technical folks do it this way.
Recently, I re-evaluated that opinion when I saw a developer using Eclipse maximized. His 17" monitor was clearly not usable with an application that had so many plugin panes simply because he didn't have room for anything else on his monitor if he wanted to size the window so that he could have all of the required views on the screen at the same time. I think that the maximized windows anti-pattern has more to do with the limitations of display size rather than because people are too stupid to do it the 'proper' way. In fact, I'd say, that the decision to maximize in a limited display is a sign that they're not so dumb after all.
However, on a large monitor, it is my opinion that mazimizing windows is a true anti-pattern because the benefits of drag and drop and multiple application interactions go away when you can only see one at a time. Most of these developers don't even know that, frequently, the easiest way to change directory in a CLI is to type 'cd ' and then drag a directory from the file browser to the terminal window. There are lots of similar GUI patterns that make working on a computer much easier.
Unfortunately, these things are often thought of as 'tricks' because the OS's have downplayed their use since users didn't seem to be using them. Most computer use is menu and wizard driven and there are very few applications that use a true OOUI.
It's one of those bizarre situations where the design was ahead of it's time and the lack of use of the features fed back to the designers who dropped the advanced features just before the technology caught up to the point where these advanced features would have actually been useful. I guess it doesn't matter that much because most users have been so heavily trained to use copy-paste and other broken metaphors instead of drag-and-drop and gestures, so that even though it may now make sense to use drag-and-drop more, nobody will bother because they're used to the old way.
It sort of reminds me of how an inferior technology like the old Palm torpedoed the prematurely advanced and poorly marketed Newton. Now we have to live with a bad paradigm.
On the other hand, having a 23" HD format monitor now makes me question Fitt's Law, which breaks down when the menu is waaay over there.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
I'm an EE, and I've found that the more screen real-estate, the better. You can have a ModelSim wave display open enough to see the signals of interest, while still having its "project" window and a bunch of emacs windows open at the same time, and I don't need to alt-tab between them.
It's also useful if you're doing PCB layout: you can have the schematic window and the layout window open and visible at the same time.
Of course, the reason for using two monitors was that one large monitor to cover that real estate was usually a lot more money than two smaller monitors, although you needed a dual-head graphics card. Now, pretty much every graphics card supports two displays.
I still think a pair of Apple 20" Cinema Displays makes more sense than a single 23" job; more pixels for the same cost.
One thing I really don't like is the takeover of the 16x9 screen aspect ratio. It doesn't serve text-based design entry very well at all, although you can have several different editor windows open next to each other.
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.....
I have 2 monitors and I absolutly love it. Copy/Paste actions or file moving and especially for debugging. Just run the App on one and the code on the other. Effectively I have a 35" screen. Now if they were both flat panels I'd be even happier.
If closed the mind be, so then the mouth should follow.