Sketch-based User Interface for Creative Tasks

Designers often need to write down their improvisatory ideas. In that process, they concentrate on their creative ideas instead of symbols they use to deliver their thoughts. However, most of the current graphics constructing tools require users to input graphic components using mouse/keyboard with lots of toolbar buttons or menu items for selection. This inconvenient, formal, and unnatural user interface is not suitable for creative tasks, especially not applicable on handled devices with small screens and no keyboards. Sketch-based User Interface offers a good solution to this problem. This article puts forward a sketch-based user interface for schematic/conceptual design tasks. Our work focuses on the three merits: humanistic, intelligent, and individualized. The three merits are combined harmoniously in the prototype system—Smart Sketchpad, which is designed for schematic/conceptual design tasks. More than 300 pre-defined graphic objects (which can be easily extended and modified) are installed in the system. Both the traditional menu/toolbarbutton-based user interface and the sketch-based user interface are integrated in this system,for the users’ convenience to compare the usability between them. As a result, most users unanimously prefer the sketch-based user interface.