Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
Anybody that takes 29.3 to do a file-copy operation needs treatment for their Parkinson's disease, NOT a bigger monitor.
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?
*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?
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"
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?"
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?