The effects of GUI on users' creative performance in computerized drawing

This paper presents the results of an empirical comparative study investigating how the outcomes of a computerized figural creativity test are affected when the participants use two different versions of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) on a mouse-operated desktop PC. The results show that participants get insignificantly lower creativity scores with the elaborated GUI, contrary to the GUI that has no visual artifacts available and offers more similar user experience to pen and paper, even though they spend significantly more time on drawing with the elaborated one. That phenomenon is expected to contribute to the cumulative effect of GUI and input method noticed by previous research. That implies that creative drawing and testing should be carefully introduced into computer-based environments.

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