CHI 2010: I Need Your Input
April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, GA, USA
Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of
Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input
Ken Hinckley1
Jenny Rodenhouse2
Abstract
[email protected]
[email protected]
Koji Yatani1,3
Andy Wilson1
[email protected]
[email protected]
Michel Pahud1
Hrvoje Benko1
Manual Deskterity is a prototype digital drafting table
that supports both pen and touch input. We explore a
division of labor between pen and touch that flows from
natural human skill and differentiation of roles of the
hands. We also explore the simultaneous use of pen
and touch to support novel compound gestures.
[email protected]
[email protected]
Nicole Coddington2
Bill Buxton1
[email protected]
[email protected]
Keywords
Pen, touch, gestures, tabletop, tablets, bimanual input
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2 Information Interfaces and Presentation: Input
General Terms
Human Factors, Design
Introduction
1
3
2
Dept. of Computer Science
One Microsoft Way
40 St. George St. Rm. 5170
Redmond, WA 98052 USA
Toronto, ON, M5S 2E4, CANADA
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Corporation
University of Toronto
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
ACM 978-1-60558-930-5/10/04.
We are witnessing a shift towards systems employing
direct manual input where the user interacts directly
with the display, rather than indirectly, as with the
mouse and cursor of traditional GUI’s. This has
renewed interest in both pen and touch input, in form
factors ranging from hand-helds, slates, desk-tops,
table-tops, and wall displays. The iPhone, Tablet PC,
Wacom Cintiq, Microsoft Surface, and Smartboard are,
respectively, examples of each. Neither multi-touch nor
pen input are new, but few systems explore their use in
conjunction [3,27,28]. The presence of both modalities
may alter our perspective on multi-touch input; the
same can be said for pen gestures. Hence simultaneous
pen + touch is a nascent topic in need of further study.
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This argues for a holistic approach rather than focused
evaluation of individual techniques [12], even though
this is often not rewarded by CHI. Our experience is
that trying many ideas [4]— some good, some bad,
and some intentionally chosen to highlight conflicting
conventions or thorny design decisions rather than hide
them [11]— is an excellent way to draw out nuances
and gain insights into novel input modalities (e.g.
[17,20,21]). Our systems-oriented approach offers a
realistic perspective of how combined pen and touch
input influences UI design issues and trade-offs.
The result is Manual Deskterity, a scrapbooking application inspired by how designers work with design
boards and notebooks [4,14]—plus our experiences
with related prototypes [15,18]. We advocate a division
of labor between pen and touch: the pen writes, touch
manipulates, and the combination of pen+touch yields
new tools. This articulates how our system interprets
unimodal pen, unimodal touch, and multimodal pen +
touch inputs, respectively. We contribute novel pen +
touch gestures, while also raising, by way of examples,
design questions that probe how the roles of pen and
touch should be differentiated (or not) in UI design.
Related Work
figure 1. Manual Deskterity prototype:
The pen writes, touch manipulates,
and pen+touch yields new tools.
Many current direct input systems employ only one of
touch or pen input. Yet an earlier generation of devices,
such as the Bell-South/IBM Simon smartphone (1993),
the Psion Series 5 PDA (1995), and the Palm Pilot
(1996), supported use of either pen or touch. Part of
what limited these earlier systems was that the
technology could not differentiate pen contact from
finger contact. Emerging dual-mode digitizers
distinguish pen and touch [9], but existing drivers do
not yet support the two simultaneously.
Several research efforts explore the combination of pen
and touch. Yee [28] uses single-touch + pen input to
support panning a canvas while drawing with the pen.
Wu [27] describes two combined pen and touch
gestures. Brandl [3] explores bimanual pen + multitouch techniques that assign the pen to the preferred
hand and touch to the nonpreferred hand. We tease
apart the factors of (1) pen vs. touch, (2) preferred vs.
nonpreferred hand assignment, and (3) unimanual vs.
bimanual interaction. For example, we consider
unimanual cases where the user interleaves pen and
touch interactions with the preferred hand, and we
explore a wider vocabulary of novel pen + touch
gestures that afford compound transactions.
Cohen discusses the complementary role of natural
language and pen gestures [7]; he treats multimodal
input with a probabilistic approach [8]. We instead treat
pen+ touch input in a manner that affords deterministic
state-machine-driven GUI’s [6]. Also, because pen and
touch are both manual input modalities, the nuances of
how the two complement one another are more subtle,
and we must overcome a longer legacy of designs that
have treated pen or touch interchangeably.
Guiard [13] observes that the hands cooperate to
accomplish tasks, so the question is not “Which hand is
better?” but rather “What is the logic of the division of
labor between the hands?” Likewise, in our research we
ask: What is the logic of the division of labor between
pen and touch in interface design? Guiard observes
that the nonpreferred hand frames the action of the
preferred hand. Our bimanual pen+touch gestures build
on this: pen gestures act upon an object, and are
phrased together by muscular tension [5] from the
user’s nonpreferred-hand fingers held on the object.
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Frisch describes a user-elicited collection of touch and
pen gestures [10], and reports that users often treat
pen and touch interchangeably. But as a result, the
user-defined gesture set contains many ambiguities.
Which pen, touch, or pen + touch gestures should a
system support (or not support), and why? In our
experience, user-defined gestures are insightful but
must be taken with a grain of salt because users have
difficulty envisioning how they would employ new
modalities of which they have little or no experience.
Indeed, our exploration of Manual Deskterity convinces
us that if each input modality offers complete coverage
of all possible interactions, it quickly robs the
combination of pen and touch of much of its vigor.
Differentiating between pen and touch, rather than
treating them interchangeably, offers a consistent and
rich designed input vocabulary. Nonetheless we build
our gestures on a vocabulary of natural occurring
bimanual actions, as shown in the following study.
Design Study Using a Paper Notebook
figure 2. User behaviors observed
during design study. (a) Users tuck the
pen between fingers while manipulating
items. (b) Thumb and forefinger grasp
an item while writing about it. (c) Cut
scraps fall onto the work surface. (d)
Users often pull tools and new content
onto the notebook from above.
We conducted an observational study to gain insight
into how people naturally work with pens, tools, and
pieces of paper. We asked each participant to illustrate
ideas for a hypothetical short film by pasting and
annotating clippings in a paper notebook. To simulate a
slate computer where the user could move between
pages, we provided a small paper notebook as the
authoring space. We provided users with pens, tape,
scissors, and 20 sheets of inspirational materials.
Eight people participated in the study. We looked for
patterns in how users gestured and structured their
working space. We observed behaviors (B1-B9) that
informed specific gestures and features in our system:
B1. Participants tucked the pen between the fingers of
their preferred hand when interleaving writing and
moving clippings (Fig. 2a). People were remarkably
adept at interleaving pen and touch in this manner.
As a result we consider unimanual multi-touch
gestures performed while the pen is tucked.
B2. Participants temporarily held clippings in place with
one finger of the nonpreferred hand (Fig. 2a).
B3. Participants exhibited a strong tendency to hold a
clipping with their nonpreferred hand while writing
about it with the pen (Fig. 2b).
B4. A common hand posture was to frame a clipping
with thumb and index finger (Fig. 2b) while writing
about it. This seemed to help users mentally focus
on a source object and reference annotations to it.
B5. Participants used only parts of the inspirational
materials. They cut a sheet while holding it in their
nonpreferred hand, above the notebook. The
unwanted part fell onto the page (Fig. 2c). Users
occasionally adopted these scraps into their work.
B6. Participants arranged the workspace with the
notebook proximal to their body, while reaching
above it to access tools and materials (Fig. 2d).
B7. Piling clippings was a common behavior. Users
formed piles of “interesting” items while holding
the remaining items in the nonpreferred hand.
B8. While not a common behavior, a couple of people
did employ clippings as a constraint for the pen, to
draw a border around an item (Fig. 3e).
B9. Tearing sheets of paper was a bimanual behavior
performed with the fingers (Fig. 3f).
The behavioral observations above form a valuable
contribution. By starting from a suitable task context
with physical objects, our approach elicits a naturally
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occurring set of unimanual and bimanual behaviors
from users, with both pen and bare-hand manipulation,
that exhibits a clear differentiation between the roles of
pen and touch. Terrenghi’s design study notes a similar
finding: physical manipulation of real-world clippings on
a tabletop yielded rich bimanual interactions, whereas
corresponding digital ones did not [25]. These stand in
contrast to the results of user-elicited gestures [10],
which might otherwise lead us to treat pen and touch
interchangeably. We feel it would be mistaken to do so.
figure 3. Additional Behaviors
observed during design study.
(e) Drawing a border around a clipping
by holding it with the nonpreferred
hand while using its edge to constrain
the path followed by the pen held in
the preferred hand. (f) Tearing a page
by anchoring it with a thumb while
pulling it away using fingers of the
opposite hand. Note that in this
example, the pen is again tucked
between the fingers of the preferred
hand, demonstrating how prevalent
this was with our participants during a
variety of manual activities.
We should also emphasize here that our intent is not to
mimic the specific actions required to work with
physical paper. Pen + touch gestures should go beyond
physical paper, but the best foundation for such
gestures likely lies in behaviors that people already
exhibit when working with pen, paper, and clippings.
Implementation
We use Microsoft Surface for our prototype. The pen
uses an infrared LED, activated during surface contact
via a tip switch. The pen is much brighter than
hand/finger contacts, so we can robustly identify the
pen as the brightest spot in the image. The software is
written in C# with WPF and the Microsoft Surface SDK.
A potential limitation of pen + touch input is the socalled “palm rejection” problem: the user may rest his
hand on the screen while writing, potentially leading to
unintended operations. Brandl [3] makes no mention of
this issue, even though he shows a black glove on the
user’s pen hand to prevent the digitizer from reacting
to palm contact. We treat touches with a large contact
area as incidental, which is sufficient for prototyping
pen + touch techniques. Robust handling of incidental
contacts remains an important problem for future work.
Application Scope and Motivation
Manual Deskterity is in some respects a “toy” system
intended primarily as a research vehicle to explore pen
+ touch, which we believe has many potential
applications. Nonetheless we emphasize practical
functionality well-suited to “idea collection,” notetaking, and mark-up functionalities that have been well
documented by previous research (e.g. [15,18,23]).
For example, several papers note the importance of
writing, annotation, selecting, copying, arranging, and
aggregating objects both in digital [1,27] and physical
contexts [2,19,26]. Our design study suggests
additional behaviors of interest in the context of pen +
touch, such as holding items while acting on them with
the pen (B2, B3, B4), cutting and tearing operations
(B5, B9), creating objects from the space above the
notebook (B6), and employing clippings as a constraint
for the pen (observation B8). These formed the basis of
the features we elected to explore using pen, touch,
and pen+touch interactions.
Core Tasks: Pen Writes, Touch Manipulates
The core interactions of Manual Deskterity are driven
by multi-touch interactions including zooming, flipping
pages, moving objects, selecting objects, and creating
new objects such as digital post-it notes. The other
central task is writing; here, only the pen produces ink
strokes (although in some contexts the finger “smears”
colors, as discussed later). Notwithstanding the
exception of finger-painting, for these core tasks the
pen writes, and touch manipulates, period. This makes
the entire canvas, and objects on the canvas, available
for immediate annotation with the pen, while
pan/zoom, page navigation, and object manipulation
are also immediately available via touch, without any
explicit mode switches.
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Selecting and Manipulating Objects
Our prototype scrapbooking application includes objects
such as photos and post-it notes that the user arranges
on the canvas via direct manipulation (single touch
drags, while multi-touch rotates and scales). The user
defines a collective scope (i.e., multiple object
selection) via finger-taps that incrementally add
individual objects to the current selection. Dragging an
item that is already selected drags it and all other
selected items while maintaining their relative spatial
relationship. Dragging an item that is not already
selected drags only that item; this enables multi-touch
dragging of items to multiple different locations.
figure 4. Selection and Context Menu.
(Top) Selection feedback consists of a
pink highlight and a large drop shadow
to visually “float” the object.
Deselected objects have only a thin
drop-shadow. (Bottom) Context
menus use a radial (marking) menu.
The user touches pen or finger to the
red dot and strokes towards the
desired command. This represents one
situation where it is necessary to
support both pen and touch
interchangeably to match user
expectations, even though elsewhere
the system sticks to a differentiation of
roles between pen and touch.
Context menus. On selection, a radial menu appears at
the upper right corner of objects (Fig. 4). Initially, our
radial menus required use of the pen, but users
uniformly expect this menu to be operable via touch as
well. As a high level principle we still advocate
differentiation of roles: the pen writes, and touch
manipulates. But acting on the radial menu represents
a limited spatially-multiplexed context where pen and
touch should indeed be treated interchangeably.
Creating new objects. In our design study we observed
that users bring in new materials from above (B6). We
incorporate this observation into our interface design
via a finger-activated bezel menu that builds on Bezel
Swipe [24]. The user performs a continuous finger-drag
that crosses the top screen bezel and onto the canvas
to create and position objects of various types, such as
digital post-its (see video). The user can then annotate
the new object immediately.
Summary. By supporting core manipulative tasks with
touch, and with touch only, Manual Deskterity enables
users to fluidly interleave annotation and other
secondary tasks. This approach also supports graceful
degradation to one-handed usage, which we believe is
an important property to afford mobile pen+touch
form-factors when they become available in the future.
Nonetheless two-handed interaction is encouraged
when the usage context makes it suitable (e.g. working
at a desk, rather than while mobile). The key is that
the mode switch is in the user’s hand: he can work
one-handed and flip between pen and touch by rapidly
tucking the pen between fingers, or he can work with
two hands by performing most touch operations with
the nonpreferred hand, while writing and annotating
with the pen in the preferred hand.
Pen + Touch Yields New Tools
Next, we explored how the expanded input vocabulary
afforded by the combination of pen and touch can give
new tools. Our design keeps the primitives for
pen+touch operations simple. The richness of the
gestures arises from how the primitives are combined.
For the pen the primitives we use are tap, drag-off,
crossing, or drawing a stroke. For multi-touch, we
employ single-finger tap, single-finger hold (i.e. a tap
with a long duration, as seen in our design study,
behavior B2), holding with thumb and forefinger (B4),
and crossing. We do not implement all combinations,
but rather support a sufficiently rich set of operations,
with semantics that map well to our application domain,
to illustrate the expressiveness of our approach.
The pen+touch techniques described below all use
fingers of the nonpreferred hand hold an item, while
the pen acts in reference to the item. This builds on the
tendency that we observed for users to hold clippings
with the nonpreferred hand while making pen markings
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in reference to them (B3), and it also corresponds well
to Guiard’s principle that the nonpreferred hand sets
the frame of reference for the preferred hand [13].
Thus, we construct gestures that allow for non-physical
digital effects, yet remain grounded in people’s
naturally occurring behaviors with physical paper.
figure 5. Stacks of items formed via
the Stapler pen+touch gesture. The
user staples items by (1) tap-selecting
a series of items, (2) holding a finger
on the representative item for the
stack, and then (3) tapping the pen on
that item while continuing to hold it.
The representative item appears on the
top of the resulting stack.
figure 6. Intricate X-Acto cuts formed
by one user during an informal
evaluation of our system.
Stapler: Grouping Items into a Stack
To support piling (design study B7) in an intuitive way
that reduces the manual effort required to drag widely
scattered items into piles, we support stapling items
into a stack (Fig. 5). The user can finger-tap-select a
number of items, and then staple all of them together
by holding an item and tapping it with the pen. The
item that the user holds appears on the top of the
stack, thus promoting it to represent the entire stack.
Tap-selecting a series of items and stapling them
together enables quick tidying of a messy work surface
into a few piles (see video). This transaction separates
the identification of the items to stack from the decision
of which item should become the representative item
on the top of the resulting stack. Performing the
pen+touch gesture on the representative item keeps
the user’s attention focused on it, at exactly the
moment the user makes this decision, which seems to
correspond well with users’ mental model of the task.
X-acto Knife: Cutting Items (and Tearing Items)
The user can turn the pen into an X-acto knife by
holding an object and fully crossing it with the pen.
That is, the pen stroke starts outside the object,
crosses through the interior of the object, and finishes
on the exterior of the object. The pen stroke within the
item can follow any path, allowing intricate cuts if
desired (Fig. 6). When the pen exits the item, both the
cut and the scrap piece appear on the page, following
the real-world action where we observed scraps falling
onto the work surface (design study B5).
To probe the semantics of pen vs. touch in analogous
gestures, we also implemented tearing items by holding
an object with a single finger, and then crossing the
item with another finger (study, B9). This tears the
item along the line connecting the entry and exit points
of the finger. The operation is similar to cutting, but
produces a different visual affordance in the scraps.
This technique demonstrates how touch can sometimes
be used to sneak a nuance of expression into a
transaction, by applying a different look or different
default command parameters. On the other hand, in
our system this precludes using the touch gesture for a
different command, such as layering. Should the
semantics of analogous pen+touch vs. touch+touch
gestures be similar or contrasting? This remains an
open design question raised by this example.
Carbon Copy: Drag-Off with the Pen
The user copies an object by holding with a finger (B2)
and then “peeling off” a copy with the pen (Fig. 7). This
gesture is similar to a copy gesture identified by Frisch
[10], but here we identify the interaction pragmatics as
well as why this gesture differs from a Copy command.
While we have so far been somewhat critical of the
user-elicited gestures methodology, in this case we
seen an example of how the methodology can yield
fertile ground for suggesting plausible gestures (so long
as we keep in mind that users are not designers).
Once the pen drags away by a minimum distance, a
semi-transparent copy of the object appears attached
to the pen. As the pen continues to drag, the object
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becomes opaque. The user may then proceed to drag
the object to “paste” it at the desired location. Any
annotations on top of the object are also copied.
figure 7. Duplicating an item by
holding it with a finger of the nonpreferred hand while dragging away
with the pen.
The properties of this approach differ from using the
Copy command of the object’s context menu (Fig. 4,
bottom). Drag-off with the pen phrases together the
entire transaction (select, copy, and drag to final
position) into a single cognitive chunk [5] via the
muscular tension of the nonpreferred hand holding
down the original item. We found that this corresponds
well to users’ mental model of duplicating items– they
not only want to copy the item, but also place the
duplicate at a particular location. By contrast, Copy
from the context menu divides the select-copy-position
transaction into multiple steps, enabling one-handed
copying at the cost of more syntactical complexity [5].
Holding an item and peeling off a copy with the pen is a
good example of a pen+touch technique that ostensibly
violates the principle that the pen writes and touch
manipulates because here the pen drags the copy.
However, those principles apply to pen or touch as
unimodal inputs. The transaction is consistent with the
principle that we use to guide multimodal gestures: pen
+ touch yields new tools. The gesture feels natural and
effective because it is grounded in people’s naturally
occurring behaviors with physical paper, such as
holding an item and making pen strokes in reference to
it (Guiard [13], and design study B3).
figure 8. Composing the Ruler tool
with the X-acto tool. The user can cut
along a straightedge, including around
corners, as shown here, to produce
interesting cutting effects.
Ruler: Using an Object as a Straightedge
The user can employ an object as a straightedge by
holding down the object with the thumb and index
finger, like the framing gesture observed in our design
study (B4, Fig. 2b). The user can then stroke along the
object with the pen stroke constrained to its border, as
inspired by observation B8.
When two fingers come down on an object, an
animation starts that increases the transparency of the
item and adds a dotted line around its border. Informal
test users who tried early versions of the system
suggested that items should become mostlytransparent in this manner so that users can see the
relationship of the straightedge to the underlying
surround of other objects and strokes.
The Ruler uses content as its own tool, introducing a
subtle duality between content and tool into our
system. We could add a dedicated ruler object, but this
would necessitate acquiring the ruler before drawing a
straightedge. Using an object as its own straightedge
also supports other sketching techniques, such as
adding a drop shadow or “outer glow” to an item. To be
clear, however, we are not arguing that the system
should not include a dedicated ruler tool; rather, we are
arguing that using an object as its own straightedge
has some interesting interaction design properties that
a dedicated ruler tool does not.
Composition of the Straightedge with Cutting
To illustrate how our interaction design allows multiple
atomic interactions to be composed together into
higher-level input phrases, we implemented X-acto
cutting along straightedges (Fig. 8). To do this, the
user first finger-tap-selects the photo to cut, and then
uses the two-finger thumb and index finger grasp on an
overlapping item to establish a straightedge. The user
can then stroke the pen across the selected photo
along the straightedge to cut it in a straight line. The
user can even cut around the corner of the masking
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figure 9. (top) Calling up additional
commands via the Finger Shadow.
(bottom) Finger painting from the
color pots. Each successive finger paint
stroke is progressively fainter, until “all
the ink is rubbed off” of the user’s
finger. In addition to mimicking
physical media such as charcoal
sketching, this facilitates a lightweight
transition out of the finger-painting
mode.
April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, GA, USA
object (Fig. 7). This composition of techniques is possible
because tapping provides a way to define a “collective”
scope of more than one object, and because holding
phrases together multiple pen and touch inputs into a
single “chunk” that the system can interpret as a unitary
command [5].
(or touching other controls, such as the bezel menu, or
flipping pages) always takes precedence over finger
painting. Otherwise, a more explicit means to “stop”
finger painting and return to the default behavior that
touch manipulates would have to be introduced, and we
did not wish to do so at this point.
Brush & Stamp: Using an Object as Its Own Tool
Our system includes a couple of techniques, which we
call stamping and brushing, for producing creative
effects by letting the user employ content on the page as
its own tool. Due to space constraints, these are
illustrated only in the accompanying video figure.
Summary and Discussion
Let us reflect briefly on how we use touch to hold items,
in combination with one or more pen strokes that act in
reference to the item that the user is holding. We have
seen that this approach enforces a strong notion of
phrasing [5] in the resulting interface design: there are
no persistent modes, but rather tool use is always tied to
holding an object with the nonpreferred hand. There is
no possibility of getting stuck in a tool mode with the
pen, nor is there ever a question of how to switch back
to the default action of drawing ink strokes on the page.
Once the user releases objects, drawing on the page
with the pen always leaves ink strokes.
Finger Shadow & Finger Painting
We have also experimented with the Finger Shadow (Fig.
9, top), which uses a finger-tap on the canvas to bring
up in-place commands (see video figure). This accesses
additional commands, including color pots.
In early demonstrations of our system we observed that
most people expect touching the color pots to enable
smearing of colors with the finger. To probe this issue
further, in this context we intentionally break our design
rule for unimodal inputs that the pen writes and touch
manipulates. To prevent finger painting from becoming a
heavyweight mode, each successive finger paint stroke
appears fainter until “all the ink has been rubbed off” the
user’s finger (Fig. 9, bottom). This also mimics how
artists naturally work with some physical media, such as
charcoal sketching.
This approach is akin to nonpreferred-hand mode
switching [16,22], but requires no physical button and
thus readily scales to a plurality of modes [25]. It also
offers an additional advantage: object selection is
integrated with the mode switch itself when the user’s
hand touches down on an object on the display. Hence a
unique design property of pen+touch is the facility with
which it can support modes and tools specific to
particular objects on the screen.
Informal Usability Evaluation
With finger painting, we have to face a genuine design
dilemma: when ink remains on one’s finger, should it be
possible to finger paint on top of objects? In our system,
the answer is no. Touching an object to select or move it
In addition to our design study, and observations from
informal demonstrations, we also conducted a usability
evaluation with seven professional designers. Due to
space constraints we note only a few observations here.
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Users found the core operations of writing and
manipulating objects via touch to be largely obvious.
Dragging new items from the top bezel was particularly
well received. The general pattern of our combined pen
+ touch gestures resonated with users, but users did
have to be told how to articulate the gestures when first
encountering them. After the study, one designer
commented that “the way it works is just like the way I
already work in my notebook!” Another user commented
that “I wouldn’t have guessed the gestures work that
way, but once I tried it, it felt pretty natural.”
Conclusion and Future Work
Our work is motivated by a desire to extend use of pen
and touch, including their use in concert, in order to
enable users to take better advantage of each. Inherent
in this statement is our belief that each has its own
strengths and weaknesses, and that these are largely
complementary. Yet, what should be the division of
labor between pen and touch input when both are
available? What is the design vocabulary afforded by
combining pen and touch? What are some potential
limitations? Such questions provide a sense of the space
that we set out to explore in this study. Our purpose has
not been to advocate any particular design; rather, to
conduct a quick informal probe that yields insights into
how interface designs can effectively combine pen and
touch input.
The fluency, flow and engagement afforded by our
system (despite the relatively primitive and sometimes
arbitrary tools tested), is an encouraging existence proof
that the path which we set out on is worth probing more
deeply and systematically. While we do not claim to have
created a revolutionary new graphic design package, our
system offers many examples and insights that should
be of considerable interest to the other researchers and
designers who are now actively exploring and seeking to
characterize the design space of pen+touch techniques.
We have observed that users, even with limited
experience, are able to engage with the system. This
demonstrates that pen + touch input on a direct display
can afford a design where the pen writes, touch
manipulates, and the combination of pen and touch
yields new tools. A number of simple pen or touch
actions (holding, tapping, dragging, crossing) can be
composed in a phrase structure, delineated by the
muscular tension of holding an object or state, that
affords a rich design space of interactions. All this can be
done without using a button on the pen, keys for nonpreferred hand mode switching [16,22], or permanently
visible UI that detracts from the user’s focus on the
workspace [20].
We have seen that if pen+touch yields new tools,
implicitly this means that in some contexts we will
violate the first two principles: the pen does not always
write, nor does touch always manipulate. Our
explorations have convinced us that if a system strictly
limits itself so that the pen ONLY writes, and touch ONLY
manipulates, this leads to a simple and consistent but
artificially crippled system. Hence the design trade-offs
we explore are intricate for good reason. Furthermore,
we could have presented one or two of the techniques in
this paper, with formal studies, but chose not to do so
because in our view the primary significance of pen +
touch accrues from the rich design space of compound
gestures that is afforded, rather than from the individual,
atomic techniques themselves. For example, for any one
of our simultaneous pen+touch techniques, one could
likely devise a pure multi-touch technique that works
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CHI 2010: I Need Your Input
April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, GA, USA
nearly as well. But we believe it would be difficult to
design a system supporting the same breadth of
operations without resorting to increased modes, onscreen widgets, and a larger set of arbitrary and/or more
complex touch gestures.
In addition to proving that our approach scales from a
demo application to a full-blown one, it also remains to
demonstrate how these techniques serve to enhance the
effectiveness and user experience of other applications,
such as working with a spread-sheet, for example. We
believe that they can and will, but that is a long-shot
from actually doing so. As well, despite our hopes for
these techniques on other form factors, the fact remains
that we have not yet done those tests. There is still
work to do.
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