Are large screens effective at supporting the analysis of delay visualizations?

Almajyul, A; Archambault, D; Forshaw, M

doi:10.1109/IV68685.2025.00015

Are large screens effective at supporting the analysis of delay visualizations?

Lookup NU author(s): Aljawharah Almajyul, Professor Daniel Archambault ORCiD, Dr Matthew Forshaw ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by IEEE, 2025.

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Abstract

Large screens are widely employed in environments such as control rooms, facilitating efficient information consumption by enhancing visual navigation. Observations from our visit to the control room underscore their utility. However, despite the growing adoption of large screens, whether they offer quantifiable benefits over traditional screens remains an open question. We hypothesize that large screens perform better due to the allocation of human cognitive resources, specifically attention and working memory. The small screen uses more working memory, leading to difficulty consuming the information. In response to this hypothesis, the present study evaluates the effectiveness of large screens in supporting visual analysis tasks. Three task types—global, local, and in-between, which fall between the two in scope—were used to assess performance across both screen sizes. A railway dataset was used to visualize delays. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted, and the results indicate that the large screen was significantly faster without detecting any difference in error rate when considering all questions overall.