Abstract

We present a visual approach to layout static components of user interfaces as hand-drawn compositions of simple geometric shapes, based on sketch recognition. We have defined a visual grammar using drawing data from target users, where we tried to figure out how people sketch interfaces and what combinations of shapes are more commonly used to define widgets. From these we built our grammar and implemented a prototype, JavaSketchIt, that allows creating user interfaces through hand-drawn geometric shapes, identified by a gesture recognizer. This prototype generates a Java interface, whose layout can be beautified using an a posteriori set of grammar rules (e.g. to align and group objects).

Citations