Pen-based computers bring the promise of tapping into people’s expressiveness with pen and paper and producing a platform that feels familiar while providing new functionalities only possible within an electronic medium. To this day, pen computers’ success is marginal because their interfaces mainly replicate keyboard and mouse ones. Maximizing the potential of pen computers requires redesigning their interfaces so that they are sensitive to the pen’s input modalities and expressiveness. In particular, pressure is an important and expressive, yet underutilized, pen input modality. This dissertation advances our knowledge about pressure-aware, pen-based interactions and how people use these techniques. We systematically explore their design by first investigating how pressure can affect pen interactions. We propose novel techniques that take advantage of the pressure modality of a pen to control, link, and annotate digital video. We then study people’s performance using pressure to navigate through a set of elements and find that they can discriminate a minimum of six different pressure regions. We introduce the concept of Pressure Widgets and suggest visual and interaction properties for their design. We later explore pressure’s use to enhance the adjustment of continuous parameters and propose Zliding, a technique in which users vary pressure to adjust the scale of the parameter space, while sliding their pen to perform parameter manipulations. We study Zliding and find it a viable technique, which is capable of enabling arbitrarily precise parameter adjustments. We finally present a novel interaction technique defined by the concurrent variation in pressure applied while dragging a pen. We study these pressure marks and find that they are a compact, orientation-independent, full interaction phrase that can be 30% faster than a stateof-the-art selection-action interaction phrase. This dissertation also makes a number of key contributions throughout the design and study of novel interaction techniques: -It identifies important design issues for the development of pressure-sensitive, pen operated widgets and interactions, -It provides design guidelines for interaction techniques and interface elements utilizing pressure-enabled input devices, -It presents empirical data on people’s ability to control pressure, and -It charts a visual design space of pressure-sensitive, pen-based interactions.

Pen-based computers bring the promise of tapping into people’s expressiveness with pen and paper and producing a platform that feels familiar while providing new functionalities only possible within an electronic medium. To this day, pen computers’ success is marginal because their interfaces mainly replicate keyboard and mouse ones. Maximizing the potential of pen computers requires redesigning their interfaces so that they are sensitive to the pen’s input modalities and expressiveness. In particular, pressure is an important and expressive, yet underutilized, pen input modality. This dissertation advances our knowledge about pressure-aware, pen-based interactions and how people use these techniques. We systematically explore their design by first investigating how pressure can affect pen interactions. We propose novel techniques that take advantage of the pressure modality of a pen to control, link, and annotate digital video. We then study people’s performance using pressure to navigate through a set of elements and find that they can discriminate a minimum of six different pressure regions. We introduce the concept of Pressure Widgets and suggest visual and interaction properties for their design. We later explore pressure’s use to enhance the adjustment of continuous parameters and propose Zliding, a technique in which users vary pressure to adjust the scale of the parameter space, while sliding their pen to perform parameter manipulations. We study Zliding and find it a viable technique, which is capable of enabling arbitrarily precise parameter adjustments. We finally present a novel interaction technique defined by the concurrent variation in pressure applied while dragging a pen. We study these pressure marks and find that they are a compact, orientation-independent, full interaction phrase that can be 30% faster than a stateof-the-art selection-action interaction phrase. This dissertation also makes a number of key contributions throughout the design and study of novel interaction techniques: -It identifies important design issues for the development of pressure-sensitive, pen operated widgets and interactions, -It provides design guidelines for interaction techniques and interface elements utilizing pressure-enabled input devices, -It presents empirical data on people’s ability to control pressure, and -It charts a visual design space of pressure-sensitive, pen-based interactions.

Knowledge workers need effective annotation tools to assimilate information. Unfortunately many digital annotators are limited in the range of document that they accept. Those that do accept many different documents do so by converting documents to images, thus losing any awareness about the original content of the document. We introduce a digital note taker that is both universal and content aware. By constructing a hierarchical context tree of document images, the structure of a document is inferred from the image. This hierarchical context tree is shown to be useful by demonstrating how it facilitates selection of document elements, reflowing documents to accommodate inserted notes, and expanding the context of links. PixelJot, and implementation of these ideas, demonstrates their feasibility.

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Scansion is the process of identifying the rhythm of a poem, which plays an important part in the process of analysing a poem by assisting readers in understanding its textual and contextual meaning. Usually, poetry students are taught to practice scansion on paper. In a time when digital media is assisting students through interactive learning in many fields, scansion is not much benefitted from it. Through this thesis we tried to provide a computer-based solution where users could practice scansion, with the added benefits of a digital medium. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the stakeholders of the project to gather the functional and design requirements for the system under consideration. Based on these requirements, we implemented an online scansion tool. We undertook an evaluation of the application to learn whether the system supports the scansion practice task in the way it is supposed to, if the additional features are beneficial in the learning process and which features needed improvement, along with an evaluation of the overall project. The results suggest that, although some features needed improvements, the users liked the application and expressed their interest in using it for practice.

The aim of the research was: *to gain a better understanding on the concepts of Human-computer interaction (HCI) in general and the application of HCI principles in this field; to gain a better understanding of electronic registration systems (e-registration systems) and the use of web forms for this purpose; to gain a better understanding of which HCI principles could be applied to the design of a web form for e-registration; to apply the identified HCI principles to an example of a web form that was to be created; •to evaluate the design of the web form by means of different data-gathering techniques, and •to redesign the web form according to the data obtained from method triangulation. In order to achieve these objectives, the research used, firstly a research methodology to determine which research approach to follow. Secondly, a literature review was then used to identify which HCI principles would be appropriate in the interface design of a web form for e-registration. The empirical part of this study consisted of a web form created according to these HCI principles, which was then evaluated according to usability goals. The evaluation included different data-gathering techniques, namely an observation of the manner in which the participants interacted with the web form, an interview which consisted of in-depth questions regarding the improvement of the web form and a questionnaire which consisted of specific questions regarding the usability of the web form. The web form was redesigned according to the suggestions made by the participants and a final web form prototype was introduced. Finally, recommendations were made for additional studies in order to extend the study of HCI principles application in web forms, specifically in the design of tax e-registration systems in South Africa. / Thesis (MSc (Computer Science))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

<p>Animations are playing an important role in today’s user interface design. To investigate the animation usage on smart phone interfaces, in this study, I inspected 428 animation videos from five smart phone apps to answer the question: “How does the animation change on interfaces from 2008 to 2017?”. By comparing the parameters such as frequency and duration based on the context from the historical perspective, the results can provide insights for both the HCI and UX community. The findings on the key markers laid a foundation for researcher to understand the animation use specially on interfaces in the industry overtime, also providing insights for practitioners to improve the user experience by looking into the animation use. </p>

Relative infrequency of communication initiation, particularly initiations that involve attention-sharing or other social purposes, appears to negatively impact the later-life outcomes of children with autism. Strategies to improve or encourage initiation skills in autism are hampered by the need for the behaviour to be spontaneous (i.e. unprompted by a partner). One potential approach that addresses the spontaneity issue is to extrinsically motivate initiations by changing aspects of the child’s environment such that they merit, or even demand, initiating a communication. Detecting subjectively inconsistent (i.e. discrepant) aspects in game-like virtual contexts appears to be something that inherently interests young children with autism, and can motivate them to initiate spontaneous, positive communications. Initial evidence for discrepancy as a communicative motivator came from a study which re-analysed video data from an existing autism and technology project (ECHOES), illustrating that a heterogeneous group of children all reacted frequently and socially to naturally occurring (i.e. unintentional, non-designed) discrepant aspects within ECHOES. A set of high-level design principles was developed in order to capture “lessons learned” from ECHOES that might facilitate re-creation of a similar pattern of spontaneous, positive initiation around discrepancy. A second, proof-of-concept study implemented these design principles in a set of three new touch-screen games (Andy’s Garden) that sought to establish, and then deliberately violate, child expectations (i.e. provide discrepancy-detection opportunities: DDOs). Children reacted socially and positively to the new games and DDOs. The results of this study allow us to answer its overall questions affirmatively: it is possible to motivate children’s communication–specifically, their initiation–by including deliberately-designed DDOs in a set of games. These findings are the first step towards determining whether discrepancy-detection opportunities may form a component of a future technology-based communication skills intervention, capable of changing children’s initiation behaviour outside of a game context.