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Experiences with digital pen, keyboard and mouse usability

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Abstract

Pen input provides intuitive and natural computer interaction for tasks such as annotating documents and sketching. However interfaces that use a pen alone can be slow and inefficient. Thus most pen interfaces also support keyboard and mouse input. Multi-modal input exponentially increases the complexity of the design and usability of these systems. Here we describe our usability testing experiences of four different pen-dominant software tools. One is designed for a digital whiteboard, two for a Tablet PC and the last for a Tablet PC coupled to a haptic pen. Our experiences suggest that pen only input is difficult to achieve with a standard operating system because the pen is appreciably overloaded. However, in situations where a keyboard and mouse is convenient, users tolerate the inefficient of pen interaction in exchange for convenience.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Beryl Plimmer

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  1. Beryl Plimmer
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Correspondence to Beryl Plimmer.

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Plimmer, B. Experiences with digital pen, keyboard and mouse usability. J Multimodal User Interfaces 2, 13–23 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-008-0002-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-008-0002-4

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