Patrick Baudisch likes to think ahead. He knows that in the future we'll all be a lot more mobile than we already are. That means we'll need tools to help us work on small devices as we travel from place to place.

He has developed a novel way to display information on a small screen.

"The moment you switch to a small screen device from a large display, you need to think about how people can still find their way around," said Baudisch.

If you had a lot of papers on a small desk, you'd probably stack them into piles. But you can't see through one paper to the one below. That means that you may never again see the papers on the bottom of the stack. Baudisch liked the stacking idea, but he made some of the layers transparent, so that you can see through the top layer to the one below. This works especially well in programs that require floating palettes or tools, such as image editing programs.

Other people have created translucent layers using a process called alpha blending. Alpha blending merges a translucent foreground with a background color to create an in-between blend. However, alpha blending does not make it easy to tell which object is in the foreground and which is in the background. Users get confused trying to select various objects. Sometimes text will blend, causing a C and a D to merge into an O.

Baudisch calls his technique multiblending. Multiblending uses multiple layers to make manipulating tools or data on a small screen easier. Multiblending allows you to see through all the layers on your screen. User studies showed that multiblended palettes provided higher recognizability of both the background and the palette than the best version of alpha blending.

"With multiblending, we think about which features we really care about instead of mixing everything together in the same way. In the case of an image editing program, what we really care about in our foreground is the edges of the tools, and preserving color in the background image."

For objects that are in the foreground, and are less important, the colors removed, and the edges are emphasized. "Then, whenever I see a crisp line, I know it's in the foreground because we've blurred the background. At the same time whenever I see a color I know this is the true background color," said Baudisch.

"Multiblending switches from RGB to a perception oriented color model. We use this because the human visual system is better at separating out the individual channels.

The first step in multiblending is to eliminate irrelevant color information. The color behind a tool palette isn't important, so in this case the color would be removed by desaturating. The luminance from the tool palette and the background are then blended.

Icons are used frequently in tool palettes. They're very simple images, and emphasizing the edges is the most important for recognition. The process is similar to embossing. Multiblending also eliminates background 'noise' and excess icons or information that aren't needed, such as frequently used areas that are well-known to the user. The resulting palette is easy to read. One possible version of the resulting top layer is a palette that looks like a glass overlay, though this is just one example.

"On small screen devices you want to be able to use your entire screen for the document you're looking at. You don't want to have a trade off between the tools you need and your document," concludes Baudisch.