Energy-Aware User Interfaces and Energy-Adaptive Displays

This paper identifies, quantifies, and analyzes potential mismatch opportunities in workload, user needs, and current display properties. Across different usage classes, we consistently find that users typically do not stress the display's full properties, and they often associate screen usage with content that can be displayed with significantly lower energy consumption. We propose new display subsystems that use energy adaptivity in hardware and energy awareness in software to obtain dramatic display power savings - with typical improvements ranging from factors of 2 to 10 without compromising user acceptance. We show that user interfaces must be designed with energy in mind, and that such energy-aware interfaces can actually provide a good combination of energy benefits and greater ease of use by leveraging features that improve usability instead of simply providing a tradeoff.