Digitizer Technology: Performance Characteristics and the Effects on the User Interface

Tablet digitizers are common devices for getting graphical data into a computer. For many applications, they are the only practical device. Because tablet digitizers have been in existence for many years, they are often regarded as "old hat" technology??nothing new can be said about them and no significant technical developments other than price decreases can be expected. This is a misconception. We have found several misunderstood performance characteristic, characteristics that can have a major effect on the user\´s ability to use a tablet digitizer in many interactive applications. The risk to an application designer is that the or she may base the interface design on incorrect assumptions. As a consequence, the interface may be awkward to use. The article shows what some of these characteristics are how to evaluate their effect in different classes of applications. Specific examples are taken from a hand-printing application for character recognition.