A comparison study of the pen and the mouse in editing graphic diagrams

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