Paper Reading #7: Manual Deskterity

Comments:

Adam Friedli

Shena Hoffman

Reference Information:

Title: Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input
Authors: K. Hinckley, K. Yatani, M. Pahud, N. Coddington, J. Rodenhouse, A. Wilson, H. Benko, B. Buxton
Presentation: (Conference Paper) CHI 2010, April 10-15, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Summary:

Source

This paper discusses the research done over the shifting of using the traditional GUI's to a more direct manual input from the user. The development begin discussed is a scrapbooking application where the user can utilize both, pen and touch inputs, the authors state that the combination of these is only present in few systems. The basis of their application is the interaction between a designer and a physical design board and notebooks and previous work in the subject. The main idea of using both, the pen and touch, and which they repeat all throughout the article, is to have a division of work - the pen writes, touch manipulates, and when the user combines both input options, new tools are created.

The authors discuss related work that has been done in the field. They state that devices in the early 1990s utilized either pen or touch, but the device did found no differentiate between the inputs, and current applications will usually implement one or the other.

An observational study was conducted by the developers where they gained knowledge of how people usually interact with pens, tools and pieces of paper. They noticed nine relevant behaviors from the group of eight people that participated in the study. These behaviors go from how the user interchanges work between pens and manual work; how they interact with clippings, those they want to use and those they don't want; how they reused parts of paper that they had cut, etc. The developers tried to support these behaviors with Manual Deskterity.

Manual Deskterity has functionality that range from using multi-touch interactions to zoom, flip pages, move and select objects, as well as creating new objects; writing, which only the pen can produce ink strokes, with the exception of finger painting. As mentioned above, majority of the functionality is divided between using the pen or touch, however, there are other functions that are reached by using both at a time. For example, stapling items into stack, cutting and tearing objects with the X-acto Knife, carbon copying items, using one object as a ruler, and more. All these functions require some type of holding the object with one hand, and doing something to it with the pen.

After a prototype was ready, they performed a usability evaluation with the help of seven professional designers. Overall, the feedback they received back was very promising. Their future work for this development focuses on demonstrating the usability and effectiveness of the device, and prove that it can enhance the user experience with applications such as this one.

Discussion:

I am one of those girls that really enjoys scrap-booking, I am no professional designer, but I see it as a hobby. I think I would really enjoy to have such an application. I think it is really interesting that the design they have given it can be used for both, professional and non professional design; I can easily see such an application being used in design courses or something along those lines. I would like to find out if there is any other research being done in the whole concept of simultaneous pen and touch inputs; it would be really interesting to see this kind of application in a device that users use everyday, for example phones, computers, etc.