A Comparison Study of The Pen and The Mouse in Editing Graphic Diagrams

Authors

Ajay Apte, Washington University in St Louis
Takayuki Dan Kimura, Washington University in St Louis

Document Type

Technical Report

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Publication Date

1993-01-01

Filename

WUCS-93-18.PDF

Technical Report Number

WUCS-93-18

Abstract

We report 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 are 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.

Comments

Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K74B2ZH0

Recommended Citation

Apte, Ajay and Kimura, Takayuki Dan, "A Comparison Study of The Pen and The Mouse in Editing Graphic Diagrams" Report Number: WUCS-93-18 (1993). All Computer Science and Engineering Research.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cse_research/305