Zoomable User Interfaces – Literature Review

Over the past thirty years the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) user interface paradigm has made the computer into a tool that allows non-specialists to get a variety of tasks done. In recent years, however, the applications available under this interface paradigm have become larger and more unwieldy, in an effort to accomplish distinct functional goals. As a successor to the traditional desktop interface, the Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), sometimes called multi-scale user interface, is a relatively new paradigm. It takes advantage of the user's spatial memory to create a more customized and dynamic working environment. It also facilitates the development of finer-grained applications that automatically interoperate with various types of data objects and other applications. A ZUI uses the metaphor of an infinite twodimensional plane to represent the user's workspace. The user's view of this workspace can be varied both in position and scale by panning and zooming respectively, and the size of the objects in the workspace can be similarly altered. This model creates sufficient space, so that the user's data objects can all be assigned permanent absolute geographic locations, leading to an advantageous use of human spatial intuition.