GUI and Energy

[Joe Friedrichsen]

Hypermiling with the Neo? Nice :-)

On 6/8/07, Gilles Casse <gcasse at oralux.org> wrote:
> * Energy-Efficient Graphical User Interface Design
> http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~mobile/publications/eegui_accepted.pdf

>From the abstract --
"We demonstrate that energy-efficient GUI (E2GUI) design techniques
can improve the average system energy of three benchmarks
(text-viewer, personnel viewer, and calculator) by 26.9%, 45.2% and
16.4%, respectively. Average performance is simultaneously improved by
23.7%, 34.6% and 19.3%, respectively."

Some general points --
* "proper selection of content placement can improve GUI interaction speed"
* "GUIs with better color schemes and contrast ratios are easier to read"
* "a GUI should present as few choices as possible"
* "a GUI should utilize as much screen area as possible for widgets to
be hit. Widgets that are supposed to be hit sequentially should be
placed near each other."

The examples that the authors give and test have a few new ideas and
the rest feel like common sense. One new idea for reading text was
neglecting scroll bars and instead using invisible half-screen buttons
for page up and page down. The top half of the screen was a page up
button, and the bottom half was a page down button.

The power-saving color schemes were awful. It looks like the iPhone
doesn't care to sip from its battery.

Joe