Global beautification of layouts with interactive ambiguity resolution

Pengfei Xu, Hongbo Fu, Takeo Igarashi, Chiew-Lan Tai
2014 Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '14  
Automatic global beautification methods have been proposed for sketch-based interfaces, but they can lead to undesired results due to ambiguity in the user's input. To facilitate ambiguity resolution in layout beautification, we present a novel user interface for visualizing and editing inferred relationships. First, our interface provides a preview of the beautified layout with inferred constraints, without directly modifying the input layout. In this way, the user can easily keep refining
more » ... tification results by interactively repositioning and/or resizing elements in the input layout. Second, we present a gestural interface for editing automatically inferred constraints by directly interacting with the visualized constraints via simple gestures. Our efficient implementation of the beautification system provides the user instant feedback. Our user studies validate that our tool is capable of creating, editing and refining layouts of graphic elements and is significantly faster than the standard snap-dragging and command-based alignment tools.
doi:10.1145/2642918.2647398 dblp:conf/uist/XuFIT14 fatcat:xl3ivnjmtjfgtlranxgm5ngsxu