Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, Bill Buxton.
Ken Hinckley is a researcher currently employed at Microsoft.
Koji Yatani is a graduate student working toward his PhD at the University of Toronto.
Michel Pahud is currently a senior researcher employed at Microsoft.
Nicole Coddington is a senior interaction designer at HTC who was previously employed at Microsoft.
Jenny Rodenhouse is currently employed at Microsoft as an Experience Design for Xbox system but previously worked as an Experience Design for the mobile division.
Andy Wilson is a senior researcher at Microsoft who focuses on Human Computer Interaction.
Hrvoje Benko works at Microsoft as a researcher and focusing on Adaptive Systems and Interaction.
Bill Buxton is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Toronto.
This paper was presented at the UIST 2010.
Summary
In this paper, Microsoft researchers investigated the using of pen and paper and how it could possibly apply to a digital device with the addition of touch. In the study, they observed people interacting with physical pages of paper and notebooks in various ways and developed an interface to allow for similar interaction. Their main idea with this interface was to allow the user to write with the pen but still interact by touch. The defining characteristic, however, is that using pen and touch together allows for new tools or features.
The first part of the paper discussed their design study with a physical paper notebook. They had people write in a notebook, cut clippings, paste the clippings and complete other various tasks. They noticed several common trends with this physical interaction including specific roles people assigned to the pen and objects, the fact that people would hold clippings temporarily, holding pages while flipping, and several others. With this in mind, they attempted to design their interface to allow for users to interact in a similar manner.
They used a Microsoft Surface device for the physical interface. Their idea with the interface was that "the pen writes and touch manipulates." Touching on the interface could move objects around or zoom in on them. Using pen as well as touch allowed them to add new tools. For example, the stapler allowed items to be grouped into stacks by selecting items then touching them all. They added others such as the X-action knife, Carbon Copy and amore.
Participants overall enjoyed the experience of the touch plus gesture. Many of the users found some of the interactions as natural and would use it without even thinking. The problem area came from special "designed" gestures where users wouldn't be able to intuitively figure it out. The researchers believed that this interface that used pen combined with touch was a success.
Discussion
The concept of using pen and touch to create a system that mimics natural physical interaction with paper is very interesting. One of the main barriers to using a tablet or laptop device to take notes is the difficult level of translating thoughts or drawings to either font on the computer or scribbles on a tablet. A scrapbook or notebook program like what they created would be very helpful and would probably do well in the market. Functional note taking applications are already extremely popular. Adding new natural gestures would increase popularity even more.
The main fault of this paper would probably be that the details of the case study weren't very evident. It would have been helpful to understand in greater detail how users interacted with the device. They researchers claimed their device fulfilled its goal but they never discussed in detail the responses to the device.
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