Creating an optimized user experience for large-scale d...

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Creating an optimized user experience for large-scale displays

As the mobile phones have changed the approach towards design and user experience, UX designers have to deal with the challenge of making a site responsive to all available (identified) form factors. So far, most of the responsive design solutions have been working on covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop.

Currently I am working on enterprise application UX redesign strategy for one of the leading airline service providers in United States. During the requirement analysis, I observered that;

One of the primary application users (supervisor) were using web based application to manage real-time airport resource allocations.  Supervisor users were using two sessions of the same application on two separate monitors; one in portrait mode and another one in landscape.  

To have more operational efficiency, users were craving for more information details like; resource list, resource shift timings, real time allocation opportunities, adhoc tasks at gate or plane side, resource optimization etc.
Practically it was difficult to have all important information on the single traditional desktop screen. So they found the alternative way of two display solution. Unfortunately it was not an effective one.

I realized that yet little attention has been paid to create an optimized user experience for large-scale displays and there is an opportunity for expanding responsive form factor range beyond the standard desktop screen.
While looking for successful case studies in the area of optimizing user experience for modern large-scale displays, I came across the concept of Responsive Upscaling. There are many articles, success stories which are talking about Responsive Upscaling concept especially in the e-commerce industry.

What is Responsive Upscaling?

Responsive Upscaling is the concept of optimizing the available (extra) screen real estate to offer users a more meaningful browsing experience, rather than just leaving it unutilized and cramming all the content into a fraction of the screen.

Core Principle behind Responsive Upscaling: Same Content, Different Packaging. 

There are two ways to utilize the extra space provided by large screens:
Insertion of additional content-  This content can only be seen by viewers with larger screen displays
Representation of existing elements - The existing elements on the pages are redesigned to use the extra space e.g. changing layouts, scaling sizes etc.

Besides this both rules have some flaws also. Like if there's content that isn't important for standard screen display, then it’s likely to be as unimportant for large screen display. Having a bigger screen doesn't mean the user wants to see unimportant details just to fill up space.

Conclusion:

It’s quite interesting how e-commerce industry is optimizing their designs for larger screens. Responsive Upscaling will help you to give a large scale display users the same superior experience your standard desktop and mobile users are enjoying.

If you have any ideas, references for optimizing UI solutions for the complex enterprise applications considering for larger screens, Please do share.