The Usefulness of Constraints for Diagram Editing
Michael Wybrow, Kim Marriott, Linda McIver, Peter J. Stuckey · 2003
This paper examines the usefulness of constraintbased alignment and distribution tools in graphical editors. Currently one-way constraints are used to provide alignment and distribution tools in many commercial editors. In this paper we discuss how limitations of oneway constraints lead to serious usability issues with such tools. To overcome these limitations, we show how to implement alignment and distribution tools using multi-way constraints. We then describe a usability study comparing these two implementations. This is the first usability study we are aware of that examines the relative usefulness of interactive graphical tools based on one-way and multi-way constraints. 1.