Levels of formality in diagram presentation
Louise Yeung, Beryl Plimmer, Brenda Lobb, Douglas M. Elliffe · 2007
The incremental beautification of hand-drawn diagrams is a process that is poorly understood. Thus implementation of beautification techniques in computer-based sketch tools is ad hoc, with most only supporting the ends of the spectrum: hand-drawn and fully formalized. Hand-drawn diagrams are more effective for early design and review but users are more satisfied with formal designs. This suggests that there may be applications for intermediate levels of formality. By understanding the attributes of visual formality it is possible to beautify a diagram progressively, thereby achieving visually consistent intermediate levels of formality. Here we present a taxonomy of the attributes of visual formality and the implementation of this taxonomy into a sketch tool.