Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
On the one hand, information can be immediately provided on a nearby display,
which however is not co-located with the paper medium. On the other hand, an
updated printout of the paper representation can contain comprehensive updates and
feedback, which is in situ, but delayed.
3.6 Conclusions and Design Guidelines
In this chapter, we presented an interaction model for Pen-and-Paper User Interfaces
(PPUIs). The model provides a conceptual basis for the design of paper-based inter-
action techniques and systems. It was developed in an inductive empirical process
and is grounded on findings from the literature, on our own field studies and on an
analysis of existing user interfaces from related work. The model defines Pen-and-
Paper User Interfaces, models interactions with PPUIs and models how information
is distributed between paper and digital representations. The model implies the fol-
lowing design guidelines for Pen-and-Paper User Interfaces:
1.
Draw upon the affordances of paper and upon traditional practices of work-
ing with paper
Traditional practices of working with paper have evolved over a long period of
time and have proven to be highly effective in many respects. As they leverage the
affordances of paper, they have advantages that GUI-inspired interfaces do not
necessarily provide (e.g. traditional interaction is reliable even though there is no
real-time feedback provided by a computer system). In order to inspire the design
of a paper-based application, the designer should use ethnographic methods to
analyze what activities within the ecology the system should support (semantic
level of the interaction model) and by which means users actually perform these
activities (syntactic level).
2.
Design a modular interface using simple and flexible building blocks
The interaction model proposes a small inventory of generic core interactions.
Each core interaction is inspired from traditional practices of interacting with
paper and designed to be intuitive, simple to use and reliable. Using compo-
sitional multiplexing, core interactions can act as building blocks and can be
flexibly combined. This provides for offering complex functionality in a PPUI
which nevertheless remains easy to use, as only a very restricted number of core
interactions is used on the syntactic level.
3.
Provide for rich interactions
The design should incorporate the richness of interacting with paper. First, this
includes using a wide variety of core interactions, in particular those that combine
multiple sheets (e.g. combining/arranging and bridging). This stands in contrast
to a design that is inspired by the single point of focus of Graphical User In-
terfaces and that uses only the core interactions of inking and clicking. Second,
PPUIs should include tangible tools that are made out of paper (e.g. leaf binders,
index stickers). This leverages the power of spatial multiplexing, binding differ-
ent functionality to different sheets of paper and thereby to different positions
