Paper Reading #20

Comments:
Comment #1
Comment #2
Reference:
Title: UIMarks: Quick Graphical Interaction with Specific Targets
Author: Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel
Venue: IUI 2009/2010
Summary:
This paper describes a system designed to allow users to "specify on-screen targets and associated actions by means of a graphical marking language." Essentially, this is a system that allows users to create graphic macros rather than keyboard or typed macros. This allows the user to use recall rather than memorization to specify when to do an action. The types of actions are given by this graphic below:

As demonstrated by the graphic, there are three types of actions: preceding, primary, and following. Only the primary actions are required, while the other actions provide a for richer choices to be made. To implement this system, the group used a slightly adapted version of the bubble cursor. The marks are made in a specific mode, where a semi-transparent overlay allows differentiation between the marks. They implemented this system on Metisse and OS X. Additionally, UIMarks was only intended to supplement other similar systems, rather than replace them or be a stand alone system. The results of the study showed that UIM had 25-60% better results/times than other systems. 

Discussion:
I thought this was decently interesting. I've read a lot of articles about this type of stuff recently, and throughout the class. I think it's interesting that I read so many articles on this stuff, yet I've never heard of this stuff before this class. I never see it anywhere else or in real world situations. Either that, or I just don't notice them. I wonder who could actually make use of these graphic macros. To me it seems like it would have a small target audience. I thought the paper was well written, not having too much technical information that would bog it down, like other papers do. Overall, I like this system and the paper.