Energy-efficient graphical user interface design

Mobile computers, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), have dramatically increased in sophistication. At the same time, the desire of consumers for portability limits battery size. As a result, many researchers have targeted hardware and software energy optimization. However, most of these techniques focus on compute-intensive applications rather than interactive applications, which are dominant in mobile computers. These systems frequently use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to handle human-computer interaction. This paper is the first to explore how GUIs can be designed to improve system energy efficiency. We investigate how GUI design approaches should be changed to improve system energy efficiency and provide specific suggestions to mobile computer designers to enable them to develop more energy-efficient systems. We demonstrate that energy-efficient GUI (E(2)GUI) design techniques can improve the average system energy of three benchmarks (text-viewer, personnel viewer, and calculator) by 26.9, 45.2, and 16.4 percent, respectively. Average performance is simultaneously improved by 23.7, 34.6, and 19.3 percent, respectively.