article review - The Design of a GUI Paradigm Based on Tablets, Two-Hands, and Transparency

  • Article

Article title: The Design of a GUI Paradigm Based on Tablets, Two-Hands, and Transparency

Authors: Gordon Kurtenbach, George Fitzmaurice, Thomas Baudel, Bill Buxton

Publication: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems

Year of publication: 1997

In this CHI '97 paper, the authors discuss a two-handed GUI paradigm based on using two hands and transparency. Their goals for the new paradigm are to maximise the amount of screen real estate used for the user's task, avoid forcing the user to switch focus from their task, and increase the degrees of manipulation and comfort of input.

The prototype system, named T3, allows the user to create and edit graphics. They use two digitising tablets and two rotation-sensitive pucks. They state that the two tablets were required for sensing rotation, but they would have preferred to use only one tablet. However, they wanted two pucks, each with one button. The user could substitute a stylus in their
dominant hand, and thus use pressure on the stylus for a button-press action. Using this two-handed interaction method, the puck in the dominant hand generally worked with the task, whereas the puck in the non-dominant hand generally worked with the tool palette.

Next, the authors describe applying the lessons learned from creating T3 to a commercial product named StudioPaint. Interestingly, they implemented a methodology for inferring the handedness of the user, instead of requiring the user to specify which is their dominant hand.

This paper does not contain any concrete findings resulting from the creation of the prototype T3 system or from the implementation in StudioPaint. I think that this is a significant oversight; how much time did the user spend learning how to use the two-handed paradigm? Likewise, the use of transparency is mostly glossed over. How did users react to
using a ToolGlass? Did they have any issues with transparency?

Related links:
ACM Digital Library page for this paper
Gordon Kurtenbach's website (which includes PDFs of all of his papers, including this one)
George Fitzmaurice's website (also has PDFs of all of his papers)
Thomas Baudel's blog
Bill Buxton's website