In this work,
we aim to explore digital inking of structured information
via handcrafted styling as a first-class object.
Visual notetaking is an essential component of work and personal life.
Bullet journaling is one example where the intent is to track progress,
visualize our daily data or to remind us something to do
or will happen.
A habit tracking template can be used to track the progress of our current tasks
or a stylized todolist with clouds to remind us what are our current things to remember for the current month
People generally use custom styles and embellishments
to create such personal visualizations.
Despite many advances in the digital
notetaking area and the abundance of notetaking applications
people still continue to do it by hand and by using pen and paper.
However, there is a lot of advantages to use digital platforms
And to better support digital notetaking
we believe that we should support techniques to preserve freeform
expression, creative embellishment, custom layouts and and to support style changes.
Toward this goal of expressive digital inking
We propose a set of novel interaction concepts in our StyleBlink prototype
we introduce dividers
that are components helping to structure handwritten notes,
dividers, separate block of information from each other,
can push aside strokes to make space
for new content.
Blocks, are a spontaneous spatial organization of handwritten notes
The content of these blocks may vary from a paragraph of text
to a bulleted list or a diagram. Blocks are often associated
with a visual style and repeated in a page.
Tags are recurrent visual elements in notes
often associated with a particular meaning for the note-taker
Tags may also serve as salient elements aiding visual search
These elements may be headers, highlighted words or keywords, or visual symbols.
Tags can be stacked on top of each other and be used
as bullets in list, or as a component user can iterate through.
The Palette
such as a painter Palette, is a place for experimenting
where users can draw strokes, and modify their properties dynamically
to get an overview of what the stroke looks like
Our palette also serves as a place for storage & quick access where users can have
visual examples combining complex properties at their fingertips.
Fillable pens are being used to leverage the computing
power and functionalities, yet, inaccessible from analog support
Fillable pens can contain digital functions that return ink
such as or arithmetical functions to average or sum numbers
It can also contain visual text annotations
such as highlighter that recognize the underlying content
Fillable pens can also contain a set of strokes
to be laid out on the page, such as a rubber band.
Those four concepts enable to:
handcraft style as a first class object. We enable styling both during
and after taking notes, and
and with approaches that afford hand-drawn digital ink that can still exhibit pride in craftmanship.
We also enable efficient creation of handcrafted design.
We seek to offer strategies and instruments that enable people to craft
unique and personal design.
We provide efficient ways to style notes and reuse personal design through blocks.
We also enable minimizing disruptions.
We avoid navigating into menus and switching applications.
We enable people to keep the pen in hand while taking notes
and with affordances for doing so with fair and in style
We also enable to interact with ink.
We enable direct manipulation on ink and leverage
the computational power available in the digital world to facilitate
parallel activities occurring during note-taking with the Pfillable pens
To gather feedback on the
concepts we proposed, we recruited 13 participants, 4 journalers,
4 notetakers that watched videos of the system
And finally, five users that interact
with the system.
Dividers
were very well received, and participants commented on its
seamless integration without the need to switch to a particular pen instrument
to insert a specific object at the specific position.
Half of the participants commented positively and aesthetically
pleasing uniformity of the templates they could create from the blocks
and half of the other participants were more excited by styling a posteriori
rather than creating templates.
Participants were particularly excited about duplication and piling of tags
as it enabled them to limit time invested in filling their journals
And generally,
it intrigued them to think of what design they could create with this new tool.
The dynamic
palette was also unanimously praised by participants
several commented on the metaphor of the real painters palette.
Participant also emphasized a less disruptive interaction, a more direct visual feedback that feel less limited
Fillable Pens were intriguing to many of the participants
All of them commented on the compound-ink pens as "such a cool idea",
enticing and preventing a simple mechanism
to craft uniform and beautiful border and decoration.
However, participants were more reserved on using fillable pens to apply
particular functions such as summing numbers as we demonstrated
As a future work,
we are interested in investigating the potential to transfer our key concepts
for other applications and contexts, such as:
Using our fillable pens on other support such as a spreadsheet
Using our palette in other contexts to store queries, formulae, or functions
or to use our block concept in a more structured approach format.