Investigating the Use of Voice and Ink for Mobile Micronote Capture

Despite the potential benefits of digital note taking tools, research has found that people continue to use paper for creating micronotes, informal personal notes such as reminders and to-dos. Design recommendations from formative studies suggest that “natural” input modalities such as voice and digital ink could help to overcome the drawbacks of text entry on phones and PDAs. We conducted an 18-person lab study to understand the perceived and actual trade-offs that these non-traditional input methods offer for micronote capture. We found that people preferred ink (8 participants) and voice (8 participants) input over keyboard (2 participants) input. Half our participants varied the input method they used in different environments, while the rest did not. However, paper remains popular and was preferred by 8 participants when given the option. The 9 participants whose ink and voice micronotes were transcribed with higher error rates had a noticeably different experience using voice including slower capture times, and higher mental and physical demand survey responses. The percentage of participants that preferred ink, voice, and keyboard was the same for both transcription quality groups.