Title :
A comparison study of the pen and the mouse in editing graphic diagrams
Author :
Apte, Ajay ; Kimura, Takayuki Dan
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Washington Univ., St. Louis, MO, USA
Abstract :
Reports the results of an experiment comparing the merits of the pen and the mouse as drawing devices. For this study a pen-based graphic diagram editor equipped with a shape recognition algorithm was developed on GO´s PenPoint operating system. A commercially available drawing program on NeXT was used for mouse-based editing. Twelve CS students were chosen as subjects and asked to draw four different diagrams of similar complexity: two with a pen and the other two with a mouse. The diagrams were chosen from the categories of dataflow visual language, Petri nets, flowcharts, and state diagrams. The results indicate that drawing by pen is twice as fast as drawing by mouse
Keywords :
graphical user interfaces; visual languages; CS students; NeXT; PenPoint operating system; Petri nets; dataflow visual language; drawing program; flowcharts; graphic diagrams; mouse; mouse-based editing; pen; pen-based graphic diagram editor; shape recognition algorithm; state diagrams; Computer graphics; Computer science; Flowcharts; Laboratories; Mice; Paper technology; Petri nets; Shape; Silicon; User interfaces;
Conference_Titel :
Visual Languages, 1993., Proceedings 1993 IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Bergen
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-3970-9
DOI :
10.1109/VL.1993.269609