Effect of Fidelity in Diagram Presentation

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Daniel's Blog

Summary

Ahh! the last paper of our sketch class. Has nothing to do with sketch recognition but only such paper which compares the feedback and usability of sketch systems with paper & pencil inputs. A good motivation from the evaluation study for researchers in the field of sketch recognition comes from this paper.

It basically presents a sketch diagram of a web-page layout from low-fidelity to high-fidelity after small portions of beautification in the diagram. The low-fidelity is the paper drawn sketch and high-fidelity is the final beautified version of the sketch.

In the user study the author selects a small group of students each is shown all the sketches from low-fidelity to high-fidelity. The results show that the changes asked by the users to be done with the sketch decreases as they move from low-fidelity to high-fidelity. An overall people preferred working with the high-fidelity sketch than paper and pencil sketch. Another interesting result is that people preferred pencil and paper sketch over the low-fidelity tablet version.

Discussion

A nice user study for sketch systems but some there are some specific cases the author has looked upon. The sketch is very domain specific to web-page layouts and user opinions might differ for other domains. The user study is also conducted on a very small group of people. The beautification stages can be modified by modifying one aspect of the sketch while keeping other constants, instead of the author's approach which slowly beautifies each aspect at each stage.