Jason Hong, Morgan Price, Bill Schilit, and Gene Golovchinsky

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

January 1999

We explored a new type of user interface, interactive cover sheets: computer forms laid out on the banner pages of print jobs that people can mark on, scan back into a multifunction printer/scanner, and use as input to applications. Cover sheets are commonly strewn around printer rooms; with interactivity, they can let people see what others have to say, add their own comments, or play games, all while waiting for their print jobs. We designed three prototype applications and deployed them briefly in our research lab. We found that interactive cover sheets can be very appealing, that the sheets must be designed so that people can still identify these pages as cover sheets, and that the slow interaction cycle favors asynchronous applications.

ubiquitous computing