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Bumping Windows between Monitors Tim Regan Mary Czerwinski Brian Meyers Greg Smith 3/12/2003 Technical Report MSR-TR-2003-13 Microsoft Research Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 Bumping Windows between Monitors Tim Regan, Mary Czerwinski, Brian Meyers, and Greg Smith Microsoft Research, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 USA timregan@ Abstract: Users’ move from single to multiple monitors so that they can use more screen real estate. This increase enables them to keep a greater number of windows open and visible at the same time. But there is a cost: arranging a window takes far longer since there is more screen space to traverse and more relationships between windows to take into account. To address this we added ‘bumping’ to an application and tested it in a user study. Bumping allowed users to automatically move a window across multiple monitors. In this paper, we present our experiment contrasting three styles of bumping. We found less window repositioning required when users were given bumping in contrast to their existing practices. However we also found that simple implementations of intelligent bumping are not predictable, causing problems for our participants. Keywords: Windows management, multimon, multiple monitors 1 Introduction As increasing numbers of users turn to multiple monitors to solve their problems of limited screen real estate, new problems with windows management arise, problems not dealt with by the operating system. To quote Grudin (Grudin, 2001): “Multimonitor development has focused on getting the system display software and the application program interface to work, with little attention to the human computer interface or intelligent exploitation by system or applications” One such problem is the increased effort in arranging windows. Multiple monitor users can (and do) keep more windows open, but as they drag windows to arrange them there is more screen space to traverse. The traditional single monitor m