WinSurfer® (ISR IP)

For more information, contact ISR External Relations Director
Jeff Coriale at coriale@umd.edu or 301.405.6604.

ISR intellectual property available to license

Inventors
Ben Shneiderman, Marko Teittinen

Description
When a hard disk becomes full, especially when being shared by many users, it is difficult to determine what is taking up needed space. After more than three years of research, the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland at College Park has developed WinSurferTM for use with Microsoft Windows.

WinSurferTM lets network data managers and individual users gracefully and rapidly examine directories and invoke file actions. This new information visualization and management tool makes possible greater control of hard disks with a colorful, eye-catching mosaic of 3,000 or more directories and files.

Initially, each tile’s area matches the file size and the color shows the file type; but it can also show file age or use a constant size. The overview shows you how you are using your disk space, and then zooming in on directories lets you get down deep into the details.

You can click on the files to view, move, copy, rename, or delete them and to execute programs or create directories. With WinSurferTM, you’ll be able to take better control of disk space, organize files, and make sense of a new set of directories rapidly.

WinSurferTM is based on the treemap concept developed in 1991 by Ben Shneiderman, founding director of the HCIL. The screen space is sliced and diced recursively to preserve structure while showing details. Empirical studies have shown significant benefits for many tasks with only 10-15 minutes of training with WinSurferTM.

The University of Maryland has copyright and trademark protection in regards to this software application. We are offering individual and corporate licenses for this software.

For more information
If you would like to license this intellectual property, have questions, would like to contact the inventors, or need more information, contact ISR External Relations Director Jeff Coriale at coriale@umd.edu or 301.405.6604.

Find more ISR IP
You can go to our categorical IP search page to search by research category or faculty name. Or view the entire list of available IP on our main IP search page.

ISR-IP-Shneiderman ISR-IP-WinSurfer ISR-IP-HCIL ISR-IP-software

Published June 15, 2007