A major research focus of our group is the design and evaluation of diagram authoring tools. We believe that the ideal diagram authoring tool is a constraint-based graphics editor customized for a particular diagrammatic notation.

Tools such as Microsoft Visio are a first step into this direction.They are based on one-way constraints and extensible templates for common notations. The design of the user-interface is crucial in such authoring tools. Although Visio provides constraint-based tools for layout, our preliminary user studies suggest that basing these on one-way constraints is counter-productive as the user finds it unclear what will happen if an object is involved in more than one constraint. However, our studies also suggest that if linear constraints are used this difficulty vanishes. 

Student
Michael Wybrow
 
Supervisors
Kim Marriott
Linda McIver
Peter Stuckey
 
Type
Research Masters