Ministry of Innovation —

The more, the merrier? Study endorses some multidisplay rigs

A study of office productivity tasks indicates that adding screen real estate …

You can never be too rich or have enough pixels, although, given the price of high-end flat panels, the two can be related. Those prices and the availability of dual-port graphics cards has led many on the Ars staff to take an alternate approach: fire up multiple monitors. Most of us pixel junkies swear that the expanded space increases our productivity, but businesses thinking of investing in large-scale rollouts of bigger or multiple displays may want a bit more definitive information. A study commissioned by display maker NEC and performed at the University of Utah provides some empirical measurements of productivity gain.

NEC provided Ars with a copy of the study, which recruited students and staff from the university as subjects. The study used two different tasks to gauge productivity. The first was standard word processor use, in which two documents containing editing were merged into a third; the second involved modifying a 30x30 spreadsheet in response to a list of corrections, followed by production of a graph. Users were given an 20" monitor, a 24" widescreen, or dual 20" displays, and results were scored by time, errors, and ability to follow directions.

For the most part, the more pixels the better, but many of the results weren't statistically significant; how those extra pixels got there was often not relevant. The impact of extra pixels was greatest for word processing, where multiple documents had to be open at once, and the widescreen displays edged out dual-monitor configurations. In contrast, the dual-display edged out the widescreen in the spreadsheet task, but the results were indistinguishable on the statistical level.

The authors also broke down the results according to competency, but that mostly demonstrated that competency trumps pixel count in all circumstances. Adept computer users outperformed everyone else in all configurations, and saw the least benefit from having more usable workspace. One interesting trend that did show up was in the dual-display configuration: users took more time setting up their workspace before starting the task, but the extra display space helped them gain back this deficit when compared to single monitor setups. Regardless of actual performance, however, users tended to like the dual-display setups.

The authors concluded that, by and large, the "best" amount of screen real estate is dictated by task. "In simple terms, when it comes to desktop real estate, more space means greater productivity until the point is reached where screen size and task requirements intersect," they write. In a few tests with even larger (26" displays), they found that performance at spreadsheet tasks would actually decline slightly.

Here at Ars, there's a diversity of opinions on how best to get the pixels we need. Managing Editor Eric Bangeman couldn't run the show here without his three displays, and Ryan Paul suffered through months of crashes before conceding that the Linux drivers weren't good enough to handle a similar setup (he's now getting by with two monitors). The Infinite Loop writers appear to occupy the other end of the spectrum; editor Jacqui Cheng prefers to work on a single display, while David Chartier uses the fullscreen mode of MacJournal to filter out distractions when writing.

As a dedicated laptop user, I find myself somewhere in between. I buy the largest laptop available at the time (I'm currently using a 17" model), and use virtual desktop software (now part of Mac OS X 10.5) to provide task-focused workspaces. In the end, however, we'd all likely fall into the "experienced user" category that could get basic tasks done quickly with however many pixels were currently available.

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