Paper Reading #16: UIMarks: Quick Graphical Interaction with Specific Targets

Reference Information:
Title: UIMarks: Quick Graphical Interaction with Specific Targets
Authors: Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel
Presentation Venue: UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New Yomrk, New York, USA

Summary:
This paper discusses software called UIMarks that deals with improving the way we interact with systems with pointers, in most cases that is through the use of a mouse. UIMarks works by working like a macro which is a chain of events. Marks can be created to have a primary action and a following action. The following action is optional. Marks can be saved on the screen so multiple Marks can be present at once. The user can cycle through Marks by using a keystroke on the keyboard.

The paper suggests that it makes sense that the Marks would be advantageous on a large screen where the travel distance is great. A study was done to see if there were any other situations UIMarks would be better for rather than standard mouse operations. It was found that UIMarks was more advantageous when the target was very small. When the users were asked if they thought using the marks was faster and easier based on a five point scale. All users put four or five for speed and three, four, or five for ease.

Discussion:

This system seems pretty interesting because you can have multiple pointers on the screen that can do different things if you want them to. It seems like if you get really used to using this system you could do things much quicker rather than using one pointer to move around on the screen. One thing I don't like about this paper is that there is a ton of terms defined by the authors used in the design that I had to reference multiple times just to decode a lot of the sentences. It was really annoying to try and understand the results of the study when I had to keep scrolling up to read what every other term meant.