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There is a ton of anecdotal evidence that adding more screen estate (more or larger monitors) leads to an increase in productivity, especially for programmers.

For example, where I work, all programmers have either two 20" screens or a single 24" screen. There is no agreement on which is the optimal setup.

The question has been extensively debated by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky:

More usable desktop space reduces the amount of time you spend on window management excise. Instead of incessantly dragging, sizing, minimizing and maximizing windows, you can do actual productive work.

— Jeff Atwood

Debugging GUI code with a single monitor system is painful if not impossible. If you're writing GUI code, two monitors will make things much easier.

— Joel Spolsky

Unfortunately, it seems to me that there is no indication that these effects are real, measurable and properly studied.

  • The papers linked by Jeff (and around other blog posts), are all sponsored by monitor making companies (NEC, Apple...)
  • The papers disagree on their conclusions: one says that a 30" monitor is better than smaller monitors, the other that there are diminishing returns.
  • Even the bloggers do not agree whether increasing the size or the number of monitors is the correct thing to do in order to increase productivity (Jeff thinks that very large monitors are bad, but a three monitor setup works, others say exactly the opposite).

What are some reliable, unbiased studies that describe correctly the relationships between number of monitors, size of monitors and productivity of software developers?
Is there a set up which is proven to work better than the others, or is this an unclear effect that needs more studies?

Christian
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Sklivvz
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    Isn't this pretty obvious or at least easy to try for yourself? I mean letssay you are doing web design, of course having the browser window and the code editing on different screens will save you time because you don't have to minimize and maximize those windows all the time to check your work? – Cray Apr 03 '11 at 19:03
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    Should you clarify the question to a specific type of occupation? Investment folks need to see different markets and stock price movements simultaneously, hence they have a plethora of monitors. Jeff and Joel speak from the software development angle. Do more monitors mean more productivity for all workers, or just workers in particular industries? – bperdue Apr 03 '11 at 21:06
  • @bperdue: done. – Sklivvz Apr 03 '11 at 21:08
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    @cray: I don't see that it's that obvious. Regardless of where the browser window is, you'll still have to alt+tab to it and hit f5 to refresh the page and see your changes. Having said that, I definitely think there is a benefit to having two monitors... – David Hedlund Apr 03 '11 at 21:33
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    @David Hedlund: there are some utilities (command-line) that allow you to set up a watcher to monitor if a file has been changed and then have it automatically trigger a browser refresh. – Andrew De Andrade Apr 03 '11 at 21:57
  • Great question, but I think you need to consider the user's eyesight as part of the research. Larger screens need to be positioned further away to avoid too much head swivelling. But if you are tending to short-sightedness, then you might chose a larger font which in turn negates the advantages of a large screen. – CyberFonic Apr 03 '11 at 22:23
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    How would someone quantify this at work? We're given a laptop and a 19" external monitor as standard equipment. I and some others now use one or two 28" monitors @ 1920x1200 either instead of or in conjunction with the 19" and laptop screen. I know am personally orders of magnitude more productive with my setup and think most of the others are as well, but how would I go about proving it? These users are scattered between Programming, Software Architecture, Project Management and Business Analysis. – Adrian J. Moreno Apr 03 '11 at 20:41
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    @iKnowKungFoo: Talk to one of your superiors about it (preferably someone in a technical position), and propose that they increase their screen estate for at least a week to see for themselves that it's a worthwhile investment for the company. While you're at it, give them a decent keyboard and mouse too. – Ashley Williams Apr 03 '11 at 22:34
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    My personal preference is a dual monitor setup with one showing the browser and the other showing my code. It helps not only in debugging UI code but also staying focused on the bigger picture. However, the biggest productivity increases come when people stop discussing things like which monitor size is optimal and actually get to work. –  Apr 03 '11 at 22:23
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    How does the research take into account bias caused by any implied prestige value on having an expensive display, as opposed to the simpler benefit of larger display area? Are employees more productive if their boss treats them to a big-shot $1000 30" display? –  Apr 04 '11 at 00:55
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    @cray, not so obvious I would say. Having more screen real estate normally means I open more applications and websites at a time causing loss of focus and less productivity. – Craig Apr 04 '11 at 03:12
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    First question: How do you measure productivity of programmers. Does the "Mythical Man Month" answer the question? @¢ray: Try ALT-Tab. Takes about 1/5 of a second to switch from editor to browser. Which is 150 switches forth and back per day, to lose 1 Minute. – user unknown Apr 04 '11 at 03:16
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    @Cray History is filled with people testing 'obvious' things and getting surprising results. For instance, isn't it obvious that heavy things ought to fall faster than light things? – Nick Johnson Apr 04 '11 at 06:47
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    I use a 16" laptop at home and a 24" monitor at work and there is a definite improvement in productivity on the larger screen. As long as the entire monitor is visible (for a single monitor setup), size does help. –  Apr 04 '11 at 08:09
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    belongs on programmers.SE. – vartec Jun 29 '11 at 22:51
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    @vartec, you are right that it would be of interest to many of the people on programmers.SE. It is a tricky issue of overlapping scopes. I suspect @Sklivvz came here to get scientific evidence, rather than the anecdotal evidence that programmers.SE normally builds upon. Based on the quality of the top-voted answers, (compared to, say, http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/49798/is-big-as-much-as-big-size-display-monitor-always-better-for-development) I think he has succeeded. – Oddthinking Jun 30 '11 at 11:18
  • I think that answers to this question should factor in OS and Window Managers that are used. If I use a standard Windows setup, too many monitors make me just as unproductive as too few. There's less window swapping but large mouse movements and more window dragging. But on my Linux machine with a tiling window manager (Awesome WM) that can be controlled through the keyboard, that negative effect of many monitors disappears and I can handle much larger screen estates. – Sander Marechal Aug 17 '11 at 20:03
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    I have to wonder - when you say "a larger monitor", what do you mean? It seems that every single monitor manufactured today has a resolution of 1920x1080, and it's next to impossible to find monitors with higher resolution than that, no matter *what* the size. So the difference in real estate between a 22" LCD and a 32" LCD is exactly none, in actual fact. Changing font sizes doesn't help much either, since you lose clarity at the larger screen size. – Ernie Nov 18 '11 at 15:53
  • Might be worth changing the title to "screen monitor" as it looks like it's a real estate question – Chris S Jan 08 '12 at 13:52
  • There's only so many pixels your eye can see. What drives me nuts is people with giant monitors writing code that's all puffed up with whitespace, putting all those pixels to waste. – Mike Dunlavey Feb 17 '12 at 17:53
  • I find it astounding that bloggers don't agree. They're usually so united in their opinions :-) – corsiKa Aug 30 '12 at 23:35
  • From a programming perspective, have 3 screens: 1) a 34 inch wide-screen for the IDE, 2) a 34-inch wide-screen with two side-by-side browser windows open (one to read documentation and another to view the development version of whatever i'm working on), and 3) a 13 inch for the terminal – Joshua Craven Jul 27 '19 at 19:48
  • I saw a vintage documentary once (unfortunately I fail to remember its name, but people on it used typewriters so it was quite old) about how the productivity of some people could be improved by giving them more space at their tables, so they could organize their papers and office gear in a more productive way, instead of having to fish for whatever they needed from the nearby drawer. The parallels to the subject of this question are quite interesting. – T. Sar Sep 24 '20 at 16:59
  • I borrowed a screen that could be rotated 90 degrees. As far as I remember, the first GUI was developed by Xerox, and the hardware featured a portrait oriented CRT. Now the thing about it is, I'm struggling to get software to be portrait oriented on a desktop, but it's not impossible. – Ate Somebits Feb 02 '21 at 01:00

2 Answers2

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This is a valid question, and something that I'm partially looking into for my thesis. Based on some initial investigation, Microsoft has done quite a bit of research in that area.

Most of the papers show that increased screen estate and multiple monitor setups can indeed improve productivity by reducing detrimental effects of interruptions. Modality of interruptions seems to be a very important aspect since spatial memory and visual cues are important for reducing primary task resumption times. The paper by Baudisch especially focuses on various ways that multiple monitors can be used, and which ones are most effective for particular use cases.

Here are some paper titles that I have come across so far:

  • Effects of Visual Separation and Physical Discontinuities when Distributing Information across Multiple Displays (Desney S. Tan1 and Mary Czerwinski) PDF

  • Partitioning Digital Worlds: Focal and Peripheral Awareness in Multiple Monitor Use (Jonathan Grudin) PDF

  • Toward Characterizing the Productivity Benefits of Very Large Displays (Mary Czerwinski) PDF

  • Keeping Things in Context: A Comparative Evaluation of Focus Plus Context Screens, Overviews, and Zooming (Patrick Baudisch) PDF

  • Display Space Usage and Window Management Operation Comparisons between Single Monitor and Multiple Monitor Users (Dugald Ralph Hutchings) PDF

  • Using Peripheral Processing and Spatial Memory to Facilitate Task Resumption (Raj M. Ratwani) PDF

Pablo A
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Kosta
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    Links added :) CiteSeerX is an excellent resource for accessing papers that are often behind various paywalls – Kosta Apr 03 '11 at 23:50
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    +1, great links. My own personal experience suggests that my productivity improvements come not from time saved switching between applications, but from not losing my visual train of thought. – Chris Knight Apr 04 '11 at 14:46
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There is a study by Microsoft Research comparing a 15" XGA flat panel with a prototype 42" curved screen using three XGA projectors. They state in their conclusion

Users were significantly faster working on the large display. In addition, all but one participant preferred carrying out the tasks on the larger display surface, and user satisfaction measures were significantly better for the larger display.

Another study comparing one 1024x786 (XGA) with two XGA displays found a benefit of dual screens:

We found that multiple monitors helped reduce task time and workload in spite of a learning effect. We also examined how prior multiple monitor usage affected performance and found regular single monitor users benefited from a multiple monitor setting in terms of both task time and workload.

A third study used a 31.5 megapixel display composed of 24 17" displays. They concluded

As the pixel-count is increased (up to 31.5 million pixels) on a high-resolution (96 DPI) display, users will perform faster on some tasks, with more physical navigation and less frustration.

In this study they also make the case that the curvature of the screens is important for such large displays.

Mad Scientist
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    We have dual 24" monitors for all developers and they all now find it pretty much impossible to work on a single monitor. A couple of specifics - several put the monitor their IDE is on vertical to get more lines of code, but keep the second one horizontal. Some of us tilt them back a bit so they are perpendicular to our eyes, but that creates a V between them. – David Thielen Apr 03 '11 at 22:42
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    Where can I get that 42" curved screen? – JD Isaacks Apr 04 '11 at 13:15
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    I use 2 - a 24" horizontal screen for visualisation, and a 20" vertical screen for code. So much easier keeping those two sides separate. I also always have the code screen on the right - not sure if any of these studies look at positioning, but I can't code on the left hand screen :-) – Rory Alsop Apr 04 '11 at 15:29
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    @RoryAlsop there's something called a [dominant eye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocular_dominance), usually the same side as your dominant hand. This may be correlated. I know that this affects things like the resting location of your mouse cursor (notice how most RTS/strategy games have the building menu on the right). My dominant eye is left and I tend to put what I'm focusing on on the left. – jaskij Sep 25 '20 at 11:28