It's simple math

A recent discovery of mine was how beneficial dual monitors can be in improving the speed and accuracy of a task. The other day I was working on a project that entailed learning a new software and a graduate student and I found a tutorial to go through to help us along. We both started going through the tutorial at the same time and after about 15 minutes I looked over to see how he was doing and he was already four pages ahead. I was curious for a minute how he got so far ahead of me when our reading speeds are about the same, but then it dawned on me that he was able to go so much faster because he had two monitors. He could have the tutorial with the data open on one of his monitors and the software program on the other. I, on the other hand, was constantly flipping back and forth between the tutorial and software on my single monitor. This made me start thinking about all of the different ways you could benefit from using dual monitors:

• Online Tutorials
• Data Transfer
• Research
• Coding

Online Tutorials

As I described above dual monitors can be beneficial when going through online tutorials because you can have the tutorial open on one screen and your program on the other. This will increase the speed at which you can accomplish tasks. Utilizing two monitors instead of one in this case could also help increase user's environmental efficiency because it would eliminate the need to print out the tutorial if the user eventually tires of consistently clicking back and forth.

Data Transfer

When transferring data from one program to another having two monitors instead of one will not only increase the speed at which this can be done, but also the accuracy. Instead of having to remember the data while switching programs, the user can see it in front of them on the other monitor which would help minimize the chance of error.

Research

When users are researching a project or product they usually are documenting what they find to be important. With two monitors the user can have their web browser open on one monitor and MS Word or MS Excel open on the other. While users are searching the Internet, notes can be directly copied and transcribed from the web browser to MS Word with increased speed and accuracy.

Coding

If you have ever coded before you know the importance of every semi-colon, period, or variable. In this situation users can have their code and compiler up on one monitor and the runtime program up on the other monitor. With two monitors users can directly see their changes as they debug and can easily glance back and forth between compiler and runtime program to see the effect of their changes.

More is definitely better...

I used to see someone using two monitors and think "Wow, definitely not necessary!" Now I have completely switched ships and wish I could use two monitors in all situations. As I hope you now realize, there are many time, accuracy, and design benefits in using two monitors instead of one. In today's world time is money and finding ways to streamline any process is a necessity. In the case of monitors, more is definitely better!

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