The Digital Pen as a Human Computer Interface

摘要

The paper begins with an explanation of Pen Computing from the User Interface perspective. The major Hardware component of a Pen Computer (its Digitizing tablet) and its major Software component (its Handwriting recognition engine) are both analyzed in terms of how a user perceives, interacts with and makes use of them. The performance of these two major components is also discussed in terms of what their contribution is towards providing the user with a virtual pen & paper experience, they way in which they do this, as well as how well they do it. The results of an experiment conducted in 1995 to investigate the relationship between HWX performance and user satisfaction are analyzed and found to suggest that the pen interface is more suited to pointing and dragging tasks than to text entry, and thus user satisfaction is application dependent. A 'physical and device-level' cognitive model for pen-based systems is developed by adapting the Keystroke-level model (by Card, Newell and Moran), where it is proposed that the pen is a better input device than the mouse in terms of speed. Finally, the results of an experiment conducted in 1991 to compare the performance of input devices in pointing and dragging tasks are analyzed and found to support the proposal...