gDoc

Like most other people I was very excited by the recent release of the Apple iPad. It wasn’t excitement about the specific device but the potential growth it heralded for the tablet PC form factor. The design of tablet PCs and modern eBook readers make a stronger connection to the experience of working with physical paper documents. They also encourage the development of natural user interfaces (NUIs) for reading and working with documents.

Working with documents in natural way is a very important part of our gDoc product vision. The first generation of natural user interfaces can be seen in the Flick and Assembly views within gDoc Fusion. The future of the gDoc Product range will take this much further. I wrote about multi-touch and gesture based technologies in a previous blog post, another natural interface we are interested in is handwriting recognition.

Considering the iPad’s name, I was surprised to see that it didn’t support handwriting input. The Windows-based tablet PCs coming to the market offer extensive handwriting recognition functionality. Intuitively, handwriting seems like a natural way to interface with this kind of device. However I’m starting to wonder if traditional handwriting is actually a skill that people would still consider natural.

Bill Buxton (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research) pointed out in a recent interview that there are only a very small number of truly innate natural skills and the rest only feel natural as we have invested large amounts of time learning and maintaining them. I was taught over a number of years to write at school, it started with block text and then moved onto a cursive (joined up) form of writing. Before the home PC was commonplace I used a pen and paper to generate all kinds of written documents. At university I reinvested time to learn how to use a PC and keyboard to write documents. I now use a PC exclusively to write documents and my hand writing skills are reduced to note taking tasks.

A couple of years ago I bought an electronic pad for taking notes in meetings. I would write on the paper and the electronic pen would record what I wrote. The recording could then be turned into text using handwriting recognition software. Sounded great until I realised that my handwriting skill had degraded too far to make it useful. Don’t get me wrong I can write legibly but not the same time as rapidly. I found myself thinking if only I had learned some form of shorthand.

I have come to the conclusion that I would be in much better position now to make technology work for me if my school had focused on teaching touch-typing together with a form of shorthand for taking notes. It makes me wonder as we move into the era of natural user interfaces (NUI) whether software companies need to be encouraging us to develop more relevant natural skills. Maybe if the iPad had offered shorthand recognition rather than handwriting recognition I would think about retraining myself again.