Sketch Recongition User Interfaces: Guidelines for Design and Development

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Akshay's Blog

Summary

This system in general is user study of a sketch system which mainly focuses on the interfaces of such systems. The system used in this study is a free-hand drawing sketch system which can recognize the shapes drawn by the user and immediately they are translated into power point objects, when the user switches the screens.

After the evaluation of the system the author describes a set of rules which according to the author should be considered when designing a sketch recognition system. Points mentioned in short are.

1. display recognition results only when the author is done sketching.
2. provide obvious indications to distinguish free sketching from recognition.
3. restrict recognition to single domain until automatic domain detection becomes feasible.
4. incorporate pen-based editing.
5. sketching and edition should use distinct pen motion.
6. SkRUIs require large buttons.
7. the pen must always respond in real-time.

The author at the end also makes the assumption that iterative design techniques paper-prototyping, heuristic evaluation, low-fidelity prototypes or wizard of oz techniques are not possible when designing such applications.


Discussion

This paper is thinking on different line of making the sketch system more usable. It define a nice framework for the usability of these sketch systems but some more work is definitely required refining the framework.