This study examined tracing and sketching performance using blunt-tipped styli on direct-touch tablets compared to using fingers. 14 participants performed tracing and sketching tasks with 3 different input methods. Tracing was faster, had fewer failures, and participants felt more comfortable using a blunt stylus compared to fingers. Sketches drawn with a blunt stylus were rated higher quality by crowdsourced voters. A follow up study with 6 participants directly compared blunt and sharp styli, finding sketches were selected 3 times more often when using a blunt stylus. The findings provide evidence that blunt styli can better support tracing and sketching tasks on direct-touch tablets compared to fingers or sharp styli.
8. Typical product design
Sketch primitives
Develop a model from primitives
Improve quality by tracing over
Can digital design tools replace paper for this?
8
23. Data collection
• Time taken for each trace
• Failures to keep to the tunnel
• Sketch Quality – expert voting
(4 independent judges)!
Tracing (5 shapes) Sketching (3 shapes)
• Questionnaire • Questionnaire
23
Introduce myself - co-authors – paper about evaluating the tracing and sketching performance on digital tablets
Need for paper in day-to-day activities – newspapers, novels, and maps – replaced with well-designed tablet applications.
[Segway] tablet replacing paper for content consumption. But what about content creation? For example, an industrial design
Industrial design – requires paper for drafting – content creation – custom hardware for sketching and design
[Segway] Provide natural interaction
For example, with digital media you no longer need to use a copier to share your ideas, you can just transfer them with a button click. Although such tools exist they cannot promise better adaptability of designers to digital medium. The question we ask is whether you can sketch on a tablet as seamlessly or naturally as on a paper?
Coming back – Wacom devices direct/in-direct interaction replace paper - but there are also numerous mobile devices – direct-touch – why not use them?
[Segway] For one thing, the capacitive touch tablets have finger input
[Segway] For one thing, the capacitive touch tablets have finger inpu
As kids used to finger painting – its messy – but learn how to draw shapes with fingers – still we are more used to pen input
Luckily, we now have digital styli, that can replace enable pen-like input to tablets – numerous models – differ in tip dimensions, material etc. – we have considered a common representative Wacom Bamboo (best consumer feedback).
Considering the digital tech -- Designer’s notebook – repository of sketches of ideas – may not be fully mature – represents early-design process – these design notebooks are useful because – small, portable
[Segway] considering all the digital technology we have right now, what is stopping us from replacing this?
A typical early design has multiple steps.
Play animation
Can we replace pen and paper with digital tools (tablets, styli)?
[Segway] aspects – that affect tablets
We have identified 4 aspects – familiarity – occlusion – friction – parallax
[segway] objective of our research – compare the performance of touch tablets with paper – ecological valid study with less constraints – similar attempts in past to compare input devices.
Bridging pen-paper and digital
Accot and Zhai 1999
Zabramski et al. 2011 both handled tracing tasks
did a rigorous study with multiple shape tracing
[Segway] since we target both sketching and tracing, as in early design, we did two user studies
[Need to show roadmap at the end]
14 participants – students from various departments in Purdue University – all had novice level exposure to design through a toy design course
3 media –
2 tasks –
multiple shapes – 5 shapes – 2 shapes.
We conducted a user study to understand the performance of three medium + input combinations i.e., stylus + tablet, finger + tablet, and pen + paper for sketching and tracing. Inspired by the previous research work in evaluating various input devices for tracing different shapes using Steering’s law, we have chosen 5 different shapes for tracing and two common 3D shapes for sketching.
We recruited 14 participants (13 male + 1 female) from various departments in our University. They were all students and they only had beginner-level experience to early design. In essence, they were not expert designers.
Tracing tasks – 5 shapes increasing complexity in curvature – participants asked to keep to an error tunnel – 3 times of each medium (so that we can compare pen-paper with tablet)
[Mention how the task was done on paper] - video recorded and analyzed
Tracing speed – faster on tablet with stylus input – followed by finger with tablet – pen-paper – just put in the average values for your reference – significant
Tracing failures – least on pen-paper – followed by stylus tablet – finger tablet – pen-paper significantly better but finger-tablet had the worst failures
In the post-survey questionnaire – we asked comfort, confidence, accuracy – pen-paper – stylus 12, 10, 10 – while only most of the participants were not with pen-paper
[Segway] this covers the tracing tasks, following this the participants did sketching task
Sketching tasks – 2 shapes – 3d shapes – 3 times of each medium (so that we can compare pen-paper with tablet) – participants selected the best representative sketch
Analysis – instead of using image processing techniques, that are hard to define – used sketch quality measure from crowdsourcing – lineups of sketches – choose one -- ratios
In each lineup, 5 sketches from the library of 42 submitted sketches for each shape was randomly displayed in a single row.
277 respondents – for sketch quality - 5,440 individual responses – and from this *[enter slide]*
In the post-survey questionnaire – again pen-paper (of course) – but this time stylus 9, 8, 7 and finger were similar except for accuracy – this can be due to the large occlusion
[Segway] looking from the aspects perspective
*Hard to quantify
Familiarity to pen-paper > tablet - occlusion is more for finger (tip size) – friction couldnot be quantified but the perception is that more on pen-paper – parallax is more on tablet screen
[Segway] clearly the media differ in these aspects but if we look at the results again
Tablet with stylus and paper performed comparably*
[Segway] so far we have looked at using existing generic input styli for direct-touch tablets. – followed with a different study - Blunt vs Sharp-tipped (Samsung note device). Coming to the second part of our paper,
Now-a-days we have tablets with better styli such as Samsung note – they have a hard tip for handwriting – so we wanted to compare them with the blunt-tipped Wacom bamboo stylus in the follow-up study
Additional bearing block (no motivation)– Sharp tipped can be used for intricate shapes..
The tasks were similar to before but this due to the low participant pool we had to do a expert voting for sketch quality rather than crowdsourcing.
Three repetitions – one selection - Not using lineups – but pair-wise selections by expert judges.
Speed was higher!!!! Not much …The results were not significant
Most of the participants were Comfortable with blunt tipped stylus – because the dimensions match a normal pen (quoted)
Accuracy, of course, was better for hard-tipped stylus
*Hard to quantify
Looking from aspects the devices clearly were different – occlusion was more on the blunt tip but the questionnaire – doesn’t translate to this – because **tip size is one thing but form factor also matters**
Samsung designed a small pen **
Results not much but summarizing, we are planning to do a more rigorous study in future but
We can take these results into account to replace the traditional design notebook with digital tools for tablets
Blunt-tip stylus is not so bad – if we can add features to improve the accuracy – form factor is important – Thank you!! If you disagree with any of the findings here we can have a discussion now or even offline