Sketch Recognition User Interfaces: Guidelines for Design and Development

We present a free-sketch recognition-based tool for creating Microsoft Power Point diagrams. Unlike many previous pen-based interfaces, this tool performs aggressive and robust recognition, allowing the user to sketch freely while the system recognizes the sketched diagram and seamlessly imports it into Power Point. Although pen-based user interfaces have been developed and studied, little has been said about the user interface issues involved in developing sketch recognition user interfaces. We present initial user interface guidelines for creating sketch recognition user interfaces (SkRUIs) based on informal, iterative user studies of our Power Point tool. Finally, based on our experience, we claim that a number of iterative design techniques developed for traditional user interfaces cannot be readily applied to SkRUIs. We discuss which techniques are best suited to the design and development of SkRUIs.