Interaction Design and Evaluation of a Digital Pen-based Note Taking System

As realized from interviews and observations, operators in control rooms useconventional pen and paper as an essential way of recording information. As aconsequence, they need to fill in many forms and transfer handwritten notes into thesystem manually. This recording of daily activities takes extra time and workload.Moreover, it is a bit messy for the operators to navigate and search the notes theyhave written on the papers. In recent years, pen-based user interfaces have become a popular research field.Various kinds of pen-based applications have been developed for different purposes,such as sketching and note taking. Pen-based user interfaces promise to provide theuser with a natural and intuitive way of interaction. The goal for this thesis project is to explore and find out a natural way to digitalizethe hand-written notes into the power grid control system. This will hopefullyfacilitate the process of real-time digital recording and communication. To achieve thegoal, a user-centered design process was involved and prototypes of a digitalpen-based user interface with a projection display were developed. Two fundamentalaspects add value to the proposed prototypes: the use of conventional paper fornatural interaction, and the use of gestures as a simple way of implementingdata-entry operations required by the user. Pen-gestures were designed based on aquantitative user survey with 45 participants. Finally, the prototypes of digital form-filling and gestures proposed were evaluated byusability testing. The results showed that the gestures designed were easy to learnand use. Participants liked the ways to digitalize the handwriting notes into thesystem. In the future, more concepts can be developed to enable the pen as anembedded part of the control system, and more gesture operations can be designedand applied