RelAltTab: Assisting Users in Switching Windows

Overview

We built RelAltTab to address a weakness of the standard Alt+Tab list: recency alone does not indicate which open windows belong to the task at hand. Our prototype combined semantic information with the timing of window use to rank windows related to the active one. We started from the hypothesis that the next window would often belong to the same activity.

We presented the related-window list in two ways and compared both interfaces with standard Windows Alt+Tab in a study with 26 participants. This was a focused prototype evaluation; we did not test whether the learned relationships remained useful across long-running, real-world workflows or across different users' ways of organizing tasks.

Publications

@inproceedings{oliver2008relalttab,
  author = {Nuria Oliver and Mary Czerwinski and Greg Smith and Kristof Roomp},
  title = {{Relalttab}: Assisting Users in Switching Windows},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2008)},
  pages = {385--388},
  year = 2008,
  doi = {10.1145/1378773.1378836},
  cites = 13,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}