Experimenting with Digital Pens for Survey Research

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Experimenting with Digital Pensfor Survey
Research

• Siu-wai Leung
• School of Informatics
• The University of Edinburgh

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Conventional Personal Interviews

• Paper-based questionnaires
• Record answers with pens
• Manual data entry
• Redundant
• Inefficient
• Error-prone
• Automation
• Paper ? Computer
• Paper ? Computer
• Paper-like UI

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Aims

• Not the best nor a revolutionary solution
• Some possibilities in using digital pens
• Avoid high costs in available solutions
• Combine conventional and new technologies to
  reduce cost
• Make a case for semi-automatic experiment setups
• Representation and reasoning
• New product development

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Paper ? Computer

• TabletPC
• WebPad
• PDA (hi-res)
• Cost of robust hardware

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Paper ? Computer

• Less repeated manual data entry
• Ordinary paper forms
• Scanning
• OMR/OCR/ICR
• Cost of specialhandling of paperforms

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Conventional OMR
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Wireless Digital Pens

• Digital clip/boards
• Digital paper
• Mobile use
• Costs
• Operations
• Royalties

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Anoto Functionality

• Patented
• A tiny camera in the digital pen
• Tiny dot patterns and grids on the paper
• Pen moves across the dot patterns and grids
• Marks, coordinates and relative time points
• Send the stored sequences to computer

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Communication

• Ordinary digital pens
• USB docking stations for PC connection
• Wireless digital pens
• Bluetooth mobile phones emails

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Digital Pen and Paper

• Almost natural pen and paper user interface
• No repeated manual data entry
• Expensive royalties for digital paper using Anoto
  functionality
• Suits standard (not frequently changed) forms

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Alternatives Paper ?? Computer
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Alternatives Operations
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Patent Bypass Operation

• Print on generic digital paper
• Merge data with form patterns
• Perform normal OMR

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Generic Digital Paper

• Anoto notepads (A4 size)
• Expensive but cheaper than royalties
• 80 pages for 50p (special occasion)
• Standard questionnaire forms
• Using OMR
• Using the standard operations rather than OMR
• Still much to explore
• Adapt to specific situations

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Expensive Experimentation

• Unaffordable to test everything
• Priority-based agenda
• Researchers decisions
• Feasible, affordable, acceptable, significant
• Automation?!

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Representation and Reasoning

• More systematic and possibly computational
• Features include components attributes
• Components objects
• Attributes variables (incl. components)
• Links dependency
• Between components
• Between attributes
• Configurations
• A complete set of links and features

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Operators in Creativity Templates

• Inclusion and exclusion
• Import an external component
• Export an unlinked component
• Linking and unlinking
• Connect two unlinked features
• Eliminate a link
• Splitting and joining
• Remove a feature (maintain the function of the
  link)
• Add a feature to a split link

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Inclusion and Exclusion
f1
f1
f2
f2
Configuration
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Linking and Unlinking
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Splitting and Joining
f1
f1
f2
f2
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Replacement Template

• Split and exclude (custom Anoto forms)
• Include (generic forms and OMR)
• Join

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A Natural Language Grammar

• S ? NP VP NP
• NP ? N
• VP ? V
• N ? John
• N ? Mary
• V ? sees

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Rewrite Rules

• Simple rulesLHS ? RHSpage(T,C) ? head(T),
  body(C).head(T) ? start(head), title(T),
  end(head).body(C) ? start(body), C,
  end(body).title(T) ? start(title), T,
  end(title).start(S) ? lt, S, gt.end(E) ?
  lt/, E, gt.
• ConditionsLHS ? RHS - CONDITIONS
• ConstraintsLHS ? RHS - CONSTRAINTS

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A Configuration Grammar

• config(T) ? question(T), capture(T).
• question(T) ? paper(T), design(T).
• capture(T) ? recognise(T), comm(T).
• paper(anoto).
• design(anoto).
• design(omr).
• recognise(anoto).
• recognise(omr).
• comm(wireless).
• comm(direct).

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Minds Arrows

• Flow
• Temporal relation
• Causal relation
• Reduction
• Composition
• Transformation
• Mapping

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Wireless Digital Pen Concept
candidateconfigurations

• Is paper most preferred as the writing surface?
  (e.g., people dont mind writing with fading ink
  on paper provided that data are electronically
  saved)

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Automated Experimentation

• Standard experimental protocols
• Concept tests
• User preference
• Automated synthesis
• Configuration representations (stimuli)
• Questionnaires (responses)

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Concluding Remarks

• Simplicity is difficult to achieve
• Representation and reasoning
• Progressive and coordinated experimentation
• Potentials in higher degrees of automation

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siu_at_inf.ed.ac.uk