Desk pop

Validation level: 5. CHI, UIST, CSCW and TOCHI paper publication

Desk pop brings the user’s desktop into the foreground while keeping other windows visible to provide access to icons on the desk while preserving as much as possible of the working context. The desktop is brought into the foreground and rendered in a way that lets the user see both its contents and the windows that previously covered it.

window management Desktop Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

Publications

Copy Bibtex Faure, G.; Chapuis, O. and Roussel, N. Power Tools for Copying and Moving: Useful Stuff for your Desktop. In CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, pages 1675-1678, ACM, Boston, United States, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems , 2009.

Also featured in

Storyboard of Functions

(1) A user activates desk pop with a "long mouse" gesture
(2) The working windows fade, showing the desktop
(3) Objects can be dragged from the desktop into working windows easily

Example: https://youtu.be/Jf8mQSyMxeU?t=74

Highlights:

Desk pop allows users to use the conventional drag-and-drop for file management, while allowing easier navigation to the destination (while holding the file). Desk pop implements partially exposing overlapped or covered windows and the desktop to compensate for the growing number of on-screen objects on interactive desktops.

Limitations:

This paper does not expand into how this technique might be pushed beyond traditional interactive desktop interfaces, nor does it make a comparison between the new implementations and existing or previous solutions.