Believe it or not, my ears perked up when I heard that Lenovo has a new laptop with a dual monitor that slides out of the main monitor. That sounds awesome! At my former workplace, we used dual monitors (laptop in a docking station and an additional monitor). I loved working on dual monitors and I miss working in that setup.

Here’s some research from Microsoft and VIBE on the benefits of dual monitors:

The first study revealed that the users’ productivity increased by 9 percent. Further studies showed even greater increases – at times up to 50 percent for tasks such as cutting and pasting. Mary Czerwinski, the VIBE research manager, is excited about her group’s discoveries, asking, “If you’re able to squeeze 10 percent more productivity out, do you know how much money that will save?”

One of the user studies that the VIBE group did required users to navigate through a series of doors, and then back their way out. They wanted to test the user’s ability to remember a series of actions on a small display versus a large display.

“The interesting thing is that they try to get it right. We found that memory capability is considerably improved on a big display over a small display. There’s something about engaging the peripheral vision that improves your spatial memory of what has gone on,” said Starkweather.

Read more about this study here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx