ProjectProposal-SimonTan
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Introduction
Here, I present the concept of an Anoto-pen-based collaborative environment. Users (especially ones who are working together long-distance) can edit documents on paper using the Anoto pen, and return them digitally to the main author. Then, using software to take in the various Anoto-pen data, the author can see the different edits, determine who was responsible for which edit, and incorporate changes back into the main document with ease.
Target User Group
Anyone who finds that they need to collaborate with others over a document can be users of this concept. Because this application has such a wide variety of uses, it is difficult to narrow it down to a particular user group. Target user groups could be:
- Students collaborating over a research paper
- SAT scorers working on grading a written essay
- Business users working on a global marketing plan
- Reporters, Journalists, and Editors of a newspaper as they prepare articles for print
- Anyone else who would be interested in a natural, yet digital, collaboration platform
All these people have one thing in common: The need to collaborate over documents that typically call for meeting together and passing copies around a table. They would like to go completely digital so that changes to the original document can be visible all at once, easily identified, and incorporated back into the document effortlessly. However, they realize that not all members of their team are technically inclined, and would like something that provides the affordances of pen and paper while going about the actual markup of the documents.
Problem Description
When was the last time you've collaborated over a document? How did your team do it? Was it in a cramped conference room? Did you pass copies of the document around, and ask each other for feedback? How did you receive that feedback? And how did you incorporate the feedback back into the original document?
Managing the individual edits of members of a group for a single document is often a challenge. As your group gets larger, the task becomes even more daunting as the number of edits and details grow. When one has to deal with dozens of copies of a document, all with different (or even similar) edits on them, it becomes a huge ordeal to sift through them all to gleam the most useful edits and apply them to the original. Sometimes, multiple people will comment and mark up a single copy of the document, and the author would like an easy way to distinguish the editors' markups. When the editors write in the same color, or write over each other, determining who put down which comment becomes nearly impossible.
How can collaborative editing be improved so that the person responsible for collecting feedback on a document is not overwhelmed with details, clutter, and duplicate edits, and can distinguish the various members of his team on the document to compare their input?
Problem Context and Forces
The problem becomes a lot more interesting when one considers a team that needs to collaborate on a long-distance scale. When a group is spread across the nation or even the globe, it is much harder to get everyone in a room together to do edits. Digital communication is a must in this situation, and the return and review of edited documents becomes just that much harder.
There have been many attempts at solving the document collaboration problem. Most notable is the tight integration between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook in the Microsoft Office System suite of programs. When using both, one can send a Word Document for review straight to their Contacts in Outlook. Upon receiving it, multiple editors make their marks on the document and return it via e-mail. The author can then take each copy of the document that comes back and merge changes into the original. If multiple people make comments to the same copy of the document, they can opt to have their individual changes and comments marked in separate colors. To the author, every change that is proposed is tagged with who marked it, which makes for easy identification of edits. Further work to simplify and track collaboration has been done by NextPage Inc. with their Document Collaboration software.
The completely digital approach of the Microsoft Office solution is a starting point for a solution in long-distance collaboration. However, it also introduces several caveats: Every member of the collaborating team must have at least Microsoft Word installed (version compatibility comes into play here as well), and every member must know how to actually use the editing features of Microsoft Word. Although simple edits are intuitive, advanced markeups such as making comments are not always obvious. The obtaining and training of such software may not be feasible, and a more natural solution may be desired.
The fundamental difference between the established Microsoft Office System collaborative method and this new concept is the medium on which editors can do their markups. Although it is perfectly possible to use the mouse and keyboard to make changes to a document sent to you, many people still prefer to make a printout and hand-edit documents. For those editors whose eyes would much rather scan over a sheet of paper than a screen, and would much rather use a pen to mark changes than force their hand to use a mouse, a more natural solution is needed.
Solution Sketch
My vision is encompassed in the following process:
- Main author sends out his document for review (through e-mail, as he probably created it in a digital word processor)
- Editors receive it as e-mail, then print the document out on Anoto-marked paper
- Each editor makes his own individual markups on his copy of the document, using his Anoto pen
- Using the classic Anoto "check-box", the editors can all return their edits directly to the author
- The author receives the Anoto-pen data in his Inbox, and imports it into a custom interface used to sort out the edits
- This interface allows him to visualize the edits in may different ways, including layering the edits on top of each other and having each layer in a different color
Here's the process in a sketch form:
