In Search for an Ideal Computer-Assisted Drawing System

Diagram drawing with conventional computer-assisted drawing(CAD) editors often tend to take considerable amount of time despite their seeming ease of use. We analyzed the problems of such systems focusing on the problem of cognitive overload, and observed that 1) the necessity of cognitive planning process in current CAD system causes the problems and that 2) reducing the overload can lead to fundamental improvement in overall drawing efficiency. We have conducted an experiment to verify these observations by comparing a typical drawing system and our prototype drawing system called Interactive Beautification, which combines the ease of freehand drawing and precision of traditional drawing editors by extracting various constraints in input strokes, and generating the desired diagrams automatically. Results show that significant amount of time is spent for cognitive planning process, and reduction of such planning time by Interactive Beautification can significantly improve the efficiency of CAD.

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