Oral Responses

This appendix presents the answers, given by the participants in the user testing, to the oral questions that they were asked after using the system and filling out the anonymous question form.

What did you think of the way that the system annotated and boxed the characters you wrote as you entered them?

• Good. It showed you what it recognises straight away.

• Helpful.

• Not distracting.

• Boxes not obviously separate in (for example) $\sqrt{2}$. ``Otherwise Cool''. Darker boxes as they overlap, perhaps.

• For things like $\sqrt{2}$, boxes overlap and are indistinguishable. (Several people have encountered this problem.)

• Too much grabbing too quickly. When it decided to start recognising what the user had written, the system ended up swallowing up strokes that were part of the character that the user was entering at the time. [This was a bug. Now fixed.]

• How about letting the user do all their writing then invoking the recogniser afterwards?

• ``Reasonable intuitively way.''

• ``Showed me what it was thinking.''

• Distracting/annoying? $\rightarrow$ No.

• Good that it shows you what it has done, and that it has had an attempt at recognising your characters.

• The colour scheme makes it hard to read the character overlaid on the box/strokes. (mentioned twice)

• Distracting? $\rightarrow$ No.

• Helps you see how things are grouped.

• Tended to group things badly.

When it didn't get all the strokes right for a particular character, how did you find the ``modify stroke groups'' method of drawing a line through the strokes to collect together/break up the strokes?

• ``Great.''

• ``Intuitive.''

• ``Quite good.''

• Easy to use/understand? $\rightarrow$ ``Yes.''

• ``Favourite bit''. Liked drawing lines through everything. Enjoyed it.

• Scribble thing was good. Easier than drawing a box around it.

• ``Pretty good.''

• ``Quick and easy.''

• Very easy to use.
• ``Fun.''

• Good that the single thing was able to both split and combine strokes.

• Nice that could either squiggle over things or draw a line.

• ``Good.''

• Especially easy to put ='s back together when the two strokes weren't grouped properly.

• ``Easy to regroup things.''

• Useful.

• Having a different coloured stroke when you were in this mode is a good visual cue.

• Easy to understand and use? $\rightarrow$ Yes.

• Was nice that could draw a squiggle to indicate which strokes, rather than drawing a box around things. Made it easy to indicate what was wanted, and avoid other stuff. Would be good for select + move.

When the system misrecognised your character, given that the stroke groupings were correct, what was your opinion of the ``modify character'' system for choosing the correct replacement for it?

• Liked it.

• ``Good system'' $\rightarrow$ could do with more alternatives than the 5 that it gives.

• ``All right'' maybe some easy way of marking stuff on the fly as you're writing, that you need to come back to later.

• Good. Didn't like typing things in though. Buttons for everything (including letters, numbers, etc.) would be good. If going to do formula entry with pen, should make it possible to use only the pen and not need to touch the keyboard at all.

• ``That was good.''

• ``Very handy.''

• Should add to the modify character entry thing a toolbar thing with the entire alphabet and all symbols.

• Pretty good.

• Without changing mode, click on the character in the top left to bring up the pop up box with alternatives. While using the system, the user tried to do this.

• ``Good. I liked the pop up menu.''

• This is an essential thing.

• Sometimes the alternatives provided on the pop up menu didn't seem to be obvious/reasonable alternatives for what was written, and occasionally an obvious alternative wasn't there at all.

When the system was unable to recognise your formula, how useful was the system in helping you to correct it?

• Need a reasonable understanding of how the system works to be able to fix problems.

• It wasn't useful at all.

• The formula graph display need to be made more ``user friendly.'' Too cluttered. Less lines would be good. [i.e. the weight lines]

• Totally unhelpful. Only because of [the observer's] help that knew what to do.

• ``Could be more useful.''

• Should come back with suggestions of where you could put things to make it clearer.

• Had to fiddle to get equations to work.

• Didn't help much.

• After a bit of use, you would start to learn the tricks necessary to make it (i.e.: not being able to parse) less of a problem.

• The formula graph display window was useful as it showed what it was doing wrong.

• Wasn't always obvious what was needed to fix things.

Other comments

• Minor problem: Using delay to determine when you had finished writing was annoying

• It would be good to see, as you were writing your formulae in, the associations that would be make in the final parsing of the formula. e.g. what would become the integrands of an integral.

• It would be nice to teach it about mathematical conventions to make it nicer/easier to use.

• The difference between an ``x (the letter x)'' and a ``$\times$ (times) is:

  

• Need to be able to enter formulae split over a number of lines [this feature needs to be provided].

• Going to need to be able to handle a lot more complex formulae before this will become something of use to a ``real'' mathematician.

• How about gridding the screen, then getting the person to write in the grid-squares?

• As well as making the character in the top left a magic thing for changing the character, could also maybe do something similar for stroke groups.

• Would be good to have a thing to find out how you should draw a character. (Smartboard has this.)

• Make the drawing cursor look like a pen.

• Autoswitch to draw mode on file $\rightarrow$new.

• Hold down shift (perhaps) to get to modify stroke groups mode.

• Could also use the squiggle concept for selecting strokes or characters to move, instead of using a rectangular region.

• Needs a better colour scheme.

• Colour coding of the stroke drawn was good for showing the different modes that the system was in.

• Would be good to have on the fly training of the character recogniser.

• Idea: If you draw a new stroke that intersects with, or passes near to something already written (even if recognised), then re-run the recogniser with the additional stroke on the strokes involved.

• The way that people conceptually see things is different to how it is written or typeset. For example, the limits on $\int^a_bc$ are seen as being ``above'' and ``below'', although they are typeset to the side of the integral sign.

• Selecting stuff with a rectangular area should only select the things that are fully enclosed by the rectangle. This would enable you to pick out things inside other things (e.g. the z in $\sqrt{z}$).

  [This leads to the idea... When you're selecting stuff, there are two sort of actions. First, there is a tap to select a single item, and there is a boxing-of-an-area to select multiple stuff.]

• The ability to interact with the formula graph display as it was parsing would be a good idea, so that you could indicate to it which things should be together if it was getting them wrong, or taking a long time. Would involve drawing the actual strokes on the formula graph display as well.

Other observations made by the observer

• Many people try to use the delete or backspace key to cut.

• One user called ``modify stroke groups'' ``group characters''.

• One user commented, and also noticed with other users, that it was tempting to go back and fix up characters that had bits missed out. Of course, this confuses the character recogniser.