Employing Blended Interaction to Blend the Qualities of Digital and Physical Books

Abstract

This paper presents Integrative Workplace, a system which blends the qualities of digital and physical sources by augmenting physical books with properties of digital books and vice versa. On the base of Blended Interaction, we designed a system which helps users to interact with the new and unfamiliar functionality of augmented documents and apply it to accomplish a real world task. In a user study, law students employed Integrative Workplace to work on a legal case. The positive feedback of participants indicated that we managed to design a system which is usable in a professional context. Furthermore, the study revealed evidence that participants apply Conceptual Blending to understand user interfaces and that digitally well-established concepts are a part of users’ reality. These findings resonate with the theoretical foundation of Blended Interaction. The results of this user study encourage us to continue to use Blended Interaction in the design process of novel user interfaces with an unfamiliar functionality.