Monday, April 25, 2011

Extra Credit Paper #7 (CHI 2010 #15)

Title: Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input
Authors: Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, and Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, Bill Buxton
Venue: CHI 2010



Summary
Manual Deskterity is a scrapbook application that  uses pen and touch devices to allow user to create a digital scrapbook. Although the application can certainly be used to create scrapbooks, the focus of the project was on the HCI elements between the users and the interface. The use of both a pen and touch input is important to this study, and was part of the reason why an application for scrapbooking was chosen for study.

Author's compared how users interacted with a real scrapbook and the digital version. While the digital interface was not intended to fully mimic how users interact with the real thing, it does have elements from this. For example, the pen is typically used for writing, while touch is used for object manipulation.



Discussion
I liked this application, although mostly for the elements of HCI study that the author's implemented into the application design. This application was extremely heavy on user studies, which I think is a good thing, and something other papers could use more of.

1 comment:

  1. I agree that I am hesitant to believe a project is doing well if they have no sort of user study to confirm that users like it.

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