next up previous
Next: Do something while waiting Up: Achieving energy-efficient GUI designs Previous: Avoid or minimize text

Reduce redundancy

This both disagrees and agrees with traditional wisdom. Traditional wisdom asks for an animated progress indicator to improve software responsiveness while a simple busy indicator may be more energy-efficient. Traditional wisdom also asks for consistent menus which keep useless menu items on the menu window, but deactivate them, in order to improve user friendliness [12] (p. $ 62$). However, such items may be removed to save energy once a user has become familiar with the software. To summarize, features that do not accelerate usage should be avoided. This does agree with traditional wisdom on task queue optimization for ignoring outdated user requests [12] (p. $ 397$).

Lin Zhong 2003-10-13