Research On Development Methods Of Pen-based User Interface

Pen-based user interface (Pen UI) is a primary style in Post-WIMP user interfaces as well as an important research direction in HCI. It is used in many application domains for its natural characteristics. Pen UI is quite different from other dominating user interfaces because of its unique metaphor and natural interaction property, the catch of user's intention is also unlike usual for their coginition model is always changed when Pen UI is used. Looking at the history of UI, the development of Pen UI can't be isolated with development methods, and the chosen methods must be consistent with the characteristics of Pen UI. Current Pen UI technique can't afford both interaction design and authoring of Pen UI. Therefore, it's necessary to carry on the research on development of methods of Pen UI, and the research will have important theoretical and practical significance.This thesis analyses and studies the characters of Pen UI, then creates a Pen UI interaction information model according to the UCD methods. Under the guidance of the model, the development methods composed of interaction design and software tools are concluded. Major research aspects and innovative achievements are listed in the following.In this thesis, the description of the Pen UI history shows the requirements for the research on development methods. After the theoretical research of Pen UI, its current development situation is analyzed, including UI metaphors, interaction characteristics, UCD properties, and new UI paradigm.As the information model is lacking for the Pen UI, the thesis creates an interaction information architecture model-OICM. This model can help designers to catch user's intention easily and accomplish linkage between the representation and control of interaction information. OICM can be the theoretical basis of the whole research mentioned here.Interaction design methods are guidance of development of Pen UI. According to the principles and goals of interaction design, the thesis describes the design process and introduces scenario-based design methods and agile development methods tostrengthen the interaction design. It puts emphasis on discussing the UCD participatory design and gives the implementation methods related.Software tools can be very helpful in rapid Pen UI authoring process. The thesis puts forward a new solution-An XML based component architecture called CoPenML. It supports high-level and multi-domain visual authoring process of Pen UI. The specification of the core markup language PUIML is described. Based on CoPenML and PUIML, an authoring suite named PUI Suite is successfully created.To gain a more natural and efficient user interface, the thesis summarizes the interaction techniques of Pen UI, especially emphasizes on the UCD interaction techniques. Since multimodal interaction technique is getting more popular and useful, the thesis studies multimodal pen-based and speech user interface and gives a multimodal integration method.Eventually, the results of all research above are applied in the development of several pen-based softwares. PUI Suite is a visual authoring tool of Pen UI, and Whiteboard Meeting System was built on this suite. In addition, the thesis creates a multimodal drawing system for children. Many interaction techniques including multimodal pen-based and speech integration are applied in it.In conclusion, the thesis aims to overcome the limitation of current development methods of Pen UI, discusses the new methods composed of two aspects. On one hand, it studies interaction design methods of Pen UI and analyzes how to implement them. On the other hand, it introduces a new solution for the software tools as guidance of Pen UI authoring.