Do Big Screens Make Employees More Productive? 472
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.
Answer is (Score:5, Funny)
yes.
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe 30" isn't the magic number, either. Maybe 30" is really TOO big and would cut my productivity because I have to constantly move my whole head to view the screen, instead of just my eyes.
I have a 37" LCD HDTV as a monitor at home. (Mainly for games.) I find I have to sit all the way across the room (Like 8' away) in order to properly view the screen. I'd get the same benefit from a ~ 22" screen that is much closer, and there wouldn't be all that wasted room space.
At work, I'm not even sure a 30" screen would fit on my desk... I seriously doubt it would make me more productive.
Also, it's worth noting that the upgrade from 15" to 19" didn't do much for my productivity at work.
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Funny)
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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).Maximized windows is an anti-pattern (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Maximized windows is an anti-pattern (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Answer is (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I can never understand is when people ridicule the idea of a larger monitor (I'm not suggesting parent was, just a standard reaction). I always get incredulous stares even with my 23" and exclamations at its size but I always respond: How productive at work would you be with a TV tray table for a desk? Some how people have been convinced that 17" of work space is all you need! Our "work space" is minuscule even with a 23" screen. I would say 23" is a minimum not a maximum.
Unrelated. This is far less of a problem with windows which only requires one click to switch between applications. The one feature where I feel that Mac OSX seriously lags behind windows is the ease of switching back and forth between two applications. Perhaps apple's survey highlights just how inefficient OSX is for a multi window user. And since this is 90% of what my OS does (the other 9% opening applications in the first place) I think they should focus more on their interface than the trying to solve it with a larger screen.
As a user of a large screen I do think Microsoft and Apple need to add a new feature to OSX and Windows. The half Maximize. There should be two extra buttons on the opposite top side: [Maximize Right][Maximize Left]. The two buttons would quickly resize the window to take up half the screen.
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Close, but not entirely. I've worked with multimonitor setups daily for several years now, I currently use a 21" plus a 14", and have come across several situations where one big monitor is better than two small ones.
- writing documents. With a 21", I can view two entire pages (A4 in my case) side-by-side. On a 19" that's possible in principle, but the zoom factor's not comfortable for long periods. 21" is the minimum size for this to work. The palettes get
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Insightful)
When doing graphics, you'd probably work better on the largest single monitor you can find.
When programming, two monitors will probably be quite convenient.
Playing a movie on two separate screens wouldn't even compare to a single big screen.
A game will just look enlarged on a larger display, whereas you'd probably get a wider view, and thus more information, on two separate monitors.
And, according to Apple's research, a big screen is pretty good for basic OS/offics tasks.
I'm sure there's more examples that go either way.
Re:Answer is (Score:4, Informative)
But then I realized I also needed one of the very few DVI dual-link video cards which weren't very cheap back then (over 200$ for the cheapest)
But this thing can't really be shared on a KVM switch easily (find a KVM with dual DVI ports, and preferably with spdif while you're at it - good luck!) Try sharing that between 4 PCs, even if you have the right video cards in each PC. Even such a KVM existed, 4 new special video cards + special KVM would likely cost more than the 30" display!
Needless to say I'm still using my pair of 21's.
Likely, Apple's display would be just as much of a PITA.
re: flexibility of dual displays (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Funny)
going to a 24" Dell has been a go|###|dsend. Maximizing a score means
I can see more staves/measures at|###| once, and spend less time scrolling.
If had 2 19" monitors, there woul|###|d be an unpleasant bar right down
the middle of my score, and invar|###|iably that would bisect a measure
which makes things a lot harder t|###|o read.
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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
Multiple monitors, oriented vertically (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Answer is (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I had the opposite experience; moving from a 15" to 19" monitor increased my productivity so much that tasks that used to take me all morning and part of the afternoon to finish are now complete by 11:30 - which gives me tons more time to browse /. on slow days, or on days like yesterday, find out about a user problem, do some research, come up with a solution, implement it, tinker with it, and roll it ou
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I can see why some would be skeptical, but it really depends on what you do. Do you write code and edit text one file at a time? Maybe two at a time? Or do you work with a few different apps at any given time and need to switch between them and move data around? The former w
Re:Answer is (Score:5, Funny)
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-Eric
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Answer: both. Higher resolution doesn't help if the screen size stays the same, because it just makes the DPI go up and you have to scale everything to make it readable. Although a 15" 300 DPI display would be nice and sharp and unaliased, I don't think it would make me any more productive than a 15" 100 DPI one because I wouldn't actually be able to display more useful information.
A 300 DPI 30" screen would be id
Suprisingly enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Suprisingly enough... (Score:5, Funny)
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why not dual or triple displays? (Score:5, Informative)
LCDs are also more productive than CRTs, because they free up more desk space for heaping junk, err... I meant, organizing my work.
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Re:why not dual or triple displays? (Score:4, Informative)
> I'm even considering getting a 3rd screen,
I have dual screens, and synergy [sourceforge.net] mouse/keyboard sharing that makes my laptop behave like the 3rd screen, highly recomended, even gives that extra processing power of a second computer. Also add a tray to stand the laptop up.
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It's a huge plus to have a document open for reading (or copying) on one monitor,
That depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
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At an old job I was trying to do excel work on a 15inch CRT monitor, zero desk space left after a case, monitor, and printer and keyboard. I can't even look at two files simultaneously in Excel, and it drove me nuts having to ctrl-tab back and forth constantly, or to resize each window into tiiiiiny little windows looking at little bits of data at a time. Above 1024 res the text became illegibly small.
Would've been far more productive on at least a 19inch monitor with 1280 res. Here at home I've
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What about Higher Resolution? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Higher DPI != more work area (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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You said "higher DPI". So characters would be larger. Work area would be mostly the same, just with big characters that take up some extra space.
Higher resolution != higher DPI.
Only works to a limited extent (Score:2)
LCDs, of course, don't really have a variable display resultion - they have one optimal resolution, and anything else looks
Moving files? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moving files? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I don't really care... (Score:5, Funny)
*copies link, sends to boss.*
Idiotic example (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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But there are multiple studies from independent groups saying you will get ~30% productivity gains by using multiple monitors.
In my experience, as a programmer and web designer, anyone doing this full time is nothing short of retarded if they don't use multiple monitors.
I hate taking my laptop somewhere else and working with just one, and can't wait to hook back up and work wi
Refer to Amdahl's Law (Score:5, Interesting)
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If the numbers justify it, a
Or just do it for employees (secretaries, data entry, etc) who spend more than [insert minumum thresh hold %] of their time doing tasks like Excel or drag N' drop stuff.
Include intangibles like employee morale and it might make sense to do it company-wide, even if it is only a breakeven proposition.
Boss: Hey guys, check out your brand new 30" monitors
Re:Refer to Amdahl's Law (Score:5, Funny)
Signed,
Rich
(your manager)
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Depending on what you're doing, yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depending on what you're doing, yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please say that didn't really need explaining.
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Oblig Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Score:4, Funny)
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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BINGO!
I'm a sys admin for an ad agency. My 15(+/-) artists beg for dual displays or bigger monitors just about every month for this very reason. "If I had a bigger monitor I could get more work done." I h
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A computer, even a yearly computer, is really a very small fraction of a typical professional salary.
Big Screen = Dual Monitor (Score:2)
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It's a great concept, but it didn't start with Gnome and KDE. Amiga had an oversize scrollable workspace in 1985. swm implemented multiple virtual desktops in 1989.
Monitor Size (Score:3, Funny)
Apple-sponsored research says... (Score:2)
Exactly. If I were Apple I would want to sell more large screens too!
Quite a bit more... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You can correct this problem if you're running Mac OS X
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Remember this was an Apple study - if you've never used a Mac for some time, you won't know it, but scaling is absolutely astonishing on the Mac compared to the PC. While on the PC (both Windos and Linux) you set a pixel resolution for the screen, and then a pixel resolution for your fonts so things work, roughly, somehow, a little bit... well, let's be honest: They don't hurt too much.
On the Mac you set a r
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People around here still run 800x600 on their 17" monitors, and complain that 1280x1024 is too small.
When I was a ground-pounder, doing on site tech support and installations, etc., I would run into this all the time, especially when people were upgrading from, say, a 17" CRT to a 17" LCD. I would just try to explain to people that the monitor is designed to run at the higher resolution, and if you run it smaller, it's actually harder to read, because it makes its self blurry while it blows up the picture.
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It's already been solved (well, for my purposes), in a lot of less mainstream wm's. larswm, dwm, and ratpoison are all forced layout managers that explore different ideas on the topic. The problem with them is that none work terribly well with Xinerama and 2+ monitors, but then, I don't know that I've ever seen a window manager that tried to work wi
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Re:Quite a bit more... (Score:5, Funny)
You had to swallow it to smuggle it in, didn't you?
A 30'' monitor at work (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a wildcard of an idea (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
More screen real-estate, not necessarily bigger (Score:2)
While I could just as easily do the same sort of thing with a single 30" screen, for the cost, having 2 cheap 17" panels makes a LOT more sense.
So while I do question the exac
Widescreen = more terminals (Score:2)
Maybe, but not as much as 2 smaller screens (Score:2)
hmmm (Score:2)
The 12" on my tablet and a 17" Dell LCD.
I put mail and an MMC on the 12" with browsers and text editors on the 17".
I'm not sure it makes me more productive but at least I know where things are.
29.3 Seconds? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? (Score:2)
...If it works, send me the extra.
It's the same crap as 5S (Score:2)
Yes, two screens make me more productive. Three screens make me even more productive- I can have corporate email, CNN, Javadocs, compiler, and editor screens open all at the same time. I save quite a bit of time. At the end of the day... how are you going to measure that exactly?
Improvement processes (such as 5S) are being implemented as we speak. My job was to 5S the coffee room. Acc
24 x 80 chars should be enough (Score:2)
Even Faster... (Score:2)
Not just productivity savings... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I'd like to debunk this 2 screen thing now (Score:3, Funny)
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.
My experience (Score:2)
Speed? Fun! (Score:2)
Which is what you want for your employees.
And, if you're truly interested in finding good people instead of the-usual-joe-average, a multiple/large screen is one of the points you can use as bait
Related in Slate (Score:2)
Link [slate.com].
Yes, but so does training (Score:5, Insightful)
Different tasks require different screen real estate, and sometimes bigger is better. But for office app productivity, the low hanging fruit is training.
The Deeper Issue (Score:4, Funny)
*at least here in the US
SHUT UP! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
More real estate is the key (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Triple-Monitor Heaven (Score:3, Interesting)
Other interesting monstrocities from the same company:
"trio-ultraHD" [digitaltigers.com]
"powerscape-ultraHD" [digitaltigers.com]
"arena24s" [digitaltigers.com]
dual monitors for years ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Can't be too cheap about these things... (Score:3, Interesting)
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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 envi
Virtual desktops and multiple screens (Score:2)
If not using Xinerama, Both screens act independantly, and you therefore get twice as much virtual desktops. The drawback being, you can't move one window from one screen to the 2nd (some gnome apps like gimp can, though, but not by dragging windows)
These additional independant virtual desktops are the reason why I'm not using Xinerama with my home Window Maker setup.
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Seriously, this is 2006. CRTs are about finished.
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OMG, What if Microsoft decide to add 'personality' to clippy and next time you're trying to finish a Word document to a deadline it pops up and says 'relax, I'm taking a break for 15mins, see ya later!' before Word minimises and refuses to play ball.
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The question to ask is "where the fuck is your tech support?" - they should be putting that information in, not wasting the time of the techincal folks. Oh, right, I've worked in those shops before - most of IT is busy rimming the CxOs, making