Pen Tablet UI/User Study/C

Subject

Name: C

Age: 22

Task: Constrained drawing, Little Precision Required

• found it difficult to look at the screen while drawing on the tablet
• said the drawings ended up on the screen exactly where she wanted them to be

Task: Unconstrained Drawing, Little Precision Required

Fixed Mode

• thought she could use the grab button to move the strokes she made
• tried using the grab button in combination with the touchpad
• so she successfully moved the paper up, but was expecting it to be an infinite canvas, not a fixed size canvas. Ended up only drawing on the bottom 2/3s of the screen, and then being stuck when she got to drawing the last graphic
• after moving the canvas, expect the drawing area to have moved up (as in MOVABLE)
• consistently showed that she expected it to work as MOVABLE, not FIXED
• was not actually able to complete the task

Movable Mode

• didn't actually understand the MOVABLE mapping at first
• but, once she played around and reset the screen, she got it figured out

"it makes a lot more sense by dragging the panel down"

Dynamic Mode

• thought she needed to either hold or click the button to set the drawing point
• figured it out pretty quickly & successfully completed the task
• "The movable one and the dynamic were definitely the easiest ones to comprehend what's happening, what you should do. ... It was obvious, it was really easy"
• said the line did not appear at the exact point where she wanted it to
• indicated that she thought the cursor would select a "quadrant" (i.e. 9th) of the screen, and then exact positioning would be determined by where she put her stylus down in the square on the pen tablet.

Task: Unconstrained Drawing, Requiring Precision

Movable Mode

• took a sec to remind herself of how it worked, then was able to immediately begin drawing properly
• was very confused by the fact that the crosshairs was sometimes not visible (this was a limitation of my prototype). I encouraged her to assume that the crosshairs are still in the spot where she last saw them.
• had a great deal of difficulty still

Dynamic Mode

• managed to do the drawing with almost no trouble
• "that's a lot easier"

Task: Reproducing her paper drawing

• strongly preferred to use the dynamic mapping
• had a problem once with putting her hand down while drawing
• sometimes drawing was obscured by the cursor
• "that's one problem with the arrow, is that it's sometimes in the way, and you don't know what you're drawing"
• "after a while you get used to it" (having to move the cursor)

Additional Notes

Which one did you like the best? - "Dynamic...cause I knew where everything was going, and I didn't have to fuss around moving the screen -- it automatically did it for you. The movable was easy, I understood it, but it's not as practical as the dynamic one." - "With [the dynamic], you know where you're drawing; with the movable, you're just kinda guessing. You're constantly moving the screen to do your drawing, so you lose track"