RelAltTab: Assisting Users in Switching Windows

Overview

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

Two interfaces presented the related-window list, and a study with 26 participants compared them with standard Windows Alt+Tab. This was a focused prototype evaluation; it 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}
}