Supporting Tangible User Interaction with Integrated Paper and Electronic Document Management Systems

Abstract

Although electronic technology has had a significant impact on the way that offices manage documents, in most cases electronic documents have not completely replaced paper documents. As a result, many present-day offices use a combination of paper and electronic documents in their normal work-flow. The problem with this, however, is that it results in information and document management becoming fragmented between the paper and electronic forms. There is, therefore, a need to provide better integration of the management of paper and electronic documents in order to reduce this fragmentation and, where possible, bring the advantages of electronic document management to paper documents. Previous research has investigated methods of incorporating management and tracking of paper documents into electronic document management systems. However, better integration between paper and electronic document management is still needed, and could potentially be achieved by augmenting elements of the physical document management system with electronic circuitry so they can support tangible user interaction with the integrated document management system. Therefore, the aim of this thesis has been to investigate this. The approach that was taken began by identifying the requirements of such integrated systems by studying the document management needs of a number of real-world offices. This was followed by the development of a series of prototype systems designed to function as tangible user interfaces to the integrated document management system. These prototypes were then evaluated against the identified requirements, and a user study was conducted in order to evaluate their usability. The results of these evaluations demonstrate that it is possible to develop systems systems that can utilise tangible user interaction techniques to enhance the integration of paper and electronic document management, and thus better bridge the divide between the physical and virtual worlds of documents.