Suffix all my comments with "But yes, this was understandable in a research prototype".
Novice vs expert. The design seemed more oriented towards novice use, than the stated audience of creative professionals.
Short-term use vs ergonomics. Long-term intensive expert use prioritizes ergonomics. So while "toss off edge" to delete is useful fun, adding a "scribble out"-like alternative that avoids giant arm motion would be nice. And traversing to "toggle ink/erase" was ick. This felt an impoverished UI vocabulary, compared to what many creative professionals are familiar with.
User|content vs user|tooling|content. Experts "wear" tooling to interact with content, so tooling information is a legitimate use of UI display. There seemed a story here of user interacting directly with content, which combined with UI minimalism, degraded the tooling experience.
Content vs representation|content. Similar argument.
Hierarchy vs graph. I do realize some people like hierarchical organization - mind maps and such. I find it crippling. But it does avoid the challenge of doing dynamic graph layout while preserving user spatial orientation.
A metaphor of a zoomable static pin-board with almost no tooling... might be a sweetspot for some. But it seems limiting. Prezi with web capture and minimal tablet UI, seems still Prezi, and niche.
Tablet tech. Note the severe constraints of using current tablet tech. Cue "understandable in a research prototype". They mention exploring dials and buttons and pressure. But there's also tilt, and rotation, and 3D position from optical tracking. They mention tablet being distinct from phone and keyboard, and deemphasize text, when a keyboard could simultaneously be a multitouch/stylus tablet (with optical tracking, and a "slice of a ping-pong ball" to slide over keys).
Research vs future. This was UX research, and may well have been useful for the community of which it was part. But... just don't confuse this with what the future looks like. AR is coming.
And there seemed some unfamiliarity with related work and current tech (yes, pen holders are a thing; yes, OCR is a thing; ...). Which for research can be fine, or not, but is something for you to bear in mind.
I enjoyed the appendices page: https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript-appendices.... My takeaway is they got burned by the painful state of web/ink/gestures on android, and the degree of domain experience needed to not-entirely-lose there. Which truncated their intended exploration. The concept of an android tablet as a node/electron machine for inking... sigh. For non-trivial multitouch and inking, I regrettably don't know of any hardware/OS/drivers/apis/libraries stack where "it just works" isn't a joke. Maybe some native iOS?
Suffix all my comments with "But yes, this was understandable in a research prototype".
Novice vs expert. The design seemed more oriented towards novice use, than the stated audience of creative professionals.
Short-term use vs ergonomics. Long-term intensive expert use prioritizes ergonomics. So while "toss off edge" to delete is useful fun, adding a "scribble out"-like alternative that avoids giant arm motion would be nice. And traversing to "toggle ink/erase" was ick. This felt an impoverished UI vocabulary, compared to what many creative professionals are familiar with.
User|content vs user|tooling|content. Experts "wear" tooling to interact with content, so tooling information is a legitimate use of UI display. There seemed a story here of user interacting directly with content, which combined with UI minimalism, degraded the tooling experience.
Content vs representation|content. Similar argument.
Hierarchy vs graph. I do realize some people like hierarchical organization - mind maps and such. I find it crippling. But it does avoid the challenge of doing dynamic graph layout while preserving user spatial orientation.
A metaphor of a zoomable static pin-board with almost no tooling... might be a sweetspot for some. But it seems limiting. Prezi with web capture and minimal tablet UI, seems still Prezi, and niche.
Tablet tech. Note the severe constraints of using current tablet tech. Cue "understandable in a research prototype". They mention exploring dials and buttons and pressure. But there's also tilt, and rotation, and 3D position from optical tracking. They mention tablet being distinct from phone and keyboard, and deemphasize text, when a keyboard could simultaneously be a multitouch/stylus tablet (with optical tracking, and a "slice of a ping-pong ball" to slide over keys).
Research vs future. This was UX research, and may well have been useful for the community of which it was part. But... just don't confuse this with what the future looks like. AR is coming.
And there seemed some unfamiliarity with related work and current tech (yes, pen holders are a thing; yes, OCR is a thing; ...). Which for research can be fine, or not, but is something for you to bear in mind.
I enjoyed the appendices page: https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript-appendices.... My takeaway is they got burned by the painful state of web/ink/gestures on android, and the degree of domain experience needed to not-entirely-lose there. Which truncated their intended exploration. The concept of an android tablet as a node/electron machine for inking... sigh. For non-trivial multitouch and inking, I regrettably don't know of any hardware/OS/drivers/apis/libraries stack where "it just works" isn't a joke. Maybe some native iOS?