Here is a quick write-up of my idea about a second generation of digital whiteboards and, in particular, simulating the human ‘zooming’ capability.

Just trying to simulate the analog whiteboard, is like the notorious “horseless carriage” that was the first generation of cars. In particular, the enormous degree of zooming in and out is unsatisfying.

This zooming is very different from standing in front of a physical whiteboard, where the facilitator ‘zooms’ by reading out some stickies or the participants by nearing it.

The big limitation of the current digital whiteboard is that they stick to the one-page-at-a-time paradigm that forces such intensive zooming, and does not yet leverage the digital capability of showing varying content at varying times in a fixed pane, which can resolve the competition of overview and detail into a cooperation: showing detail and its context simultaneously.

A big reason for this orthodox sticking to one page is the theory that annotations cost too much cognitive load if they are not shown close to the item being described, but this is only true for drone-like eye-movements (that need to find their varying way), not for eye-saccades that work in a ballistic way, just as human zooming works when targeting a constant default location such as the upper right corner.

Furthermore, the context of a focussed item is perceived much differently in humans: when we are moving the focal point of sight, the overview of the periphery is preserved mostly in short-term memory (although we think we see the entire visual field with the same resolution). So the contents of the periphery are still easily revisitable but not directly and obtrusively present and distracting, while the brute-force zooming of page-based maps creates great distraction.
By contrast, distraction-free lookup of details eventually helps to foreground partial patterns and to internalize crucial connections.

So the paradox is that the most direct implementation of zooming is much less effective than human zooming, while an indirect approach might be more effective. But this is not an unusual effect: for example animals who grasp their meal directly with their mouth instead of hands are outperformed; similarly, tapping directly with one’s fingers on touch devices is often more ineffective (because of less granularity and more occluding the focal point with one’s fingers) than a mouse-operation.

Hence, an indirect method of ‘mouse-gazing’ will outperform incessant zooming, and hiding the peripheral items until selected, will better help thinking than always showing the neighborhood directly. Similarly, moving around the handles of individual items is much easier than directly rearranging the stickies themselves, and hence more conducive to condensing and connecting the items. And lastly, connecting an annotation sticky is more unproblematic than directly modifying existing content of others.

A digital whiteboard that closer resembles the human approach to an analog whiteboard, might also bridge the two worlds, by running the digital versions on both the facilitator device and optionally on participants’ devices in the meeting room, with the synchronisation more or less tight, depending on how people are unhesitant und playful.