Shared gaze, where collaborators can see each other's point of gaze visualized on their screen in real time, is a novel non-verbal mechanism that augments remote collaborations and increases shared awareness and common grounding. While past studies have focused on well-structured tasks and analyzed task performance and efficiency, our study explores the domain of collaborative drawing for recreational purposes and focuses on collaborators' own perceptions. We surveyed 75 users of online collaborative drawing platforms who mostly drew collaboratively for recreation and artistic growth; they reported the importance of communication but also of retaining individual space despite the collaborative setting. Informed by this and prior research on shared gaze, we evaluate collaboration by allowing two collaborators to draw synchronously on a shared canvas and share their point of gaze. We conducted a study with 24 pairs that drew collaboratively under all combinations of shared gaze and voice communication. Combining voice and shared gaze was perceived to reach the best balance between tightly coupled collaboration and parallel individual execution. Shared gaze led to higher spatial awareness and less turn-taking was observed in conditions that shared gaze was present. Surprisingly, many participants found the lack of any communication medium to afford the highest degree of divergent thinking. Our findings provide guidelines for adaptive tools that consider individual preferences as well as the nature of the task to better support remote collaborations that are open-ended and prize creativity.

The message a designer wants to convey plays a pivotal role in directing the design of an infographic, yet most authoring workflows start with creating the visualizations or graphics first without gauging whether they fit the message. To address this gap, we propose Epigraphics, a web-based authoring system that treats an “epigraph” as the first-class object, and uses it to guide infographic asset creation, editing, and syncing. The system uses the text-based message to recommend visualizations, graphics, data filters, color palettes, and animations. It further supports between-asset interactions and fine-tuning such as recoloring, highlighting, and animation syncing that enhance the aesthetic cohesiveness of the assets. A gallery and case studies show that our system can produce infographics inspired by existing popular ones, and a task-based usability study with 10 designers show that a text-sourced workflow can standardize content, empower users to think more about the big picture, and facilitate rapid prototyping.

Efforts to expand the authoring of visual stories beyond the 2D canvas have commonly mapped flat imagery to 3D scenes or objects. This translation requires spatial reasoning, as artists must think in two spaces. We propose PortalInk 1, a tool for artists to craft and export 2.5D graphical stories while remaining in 2D space by using SVG transitions. This is achieved via a parallax effect that generates a sense of depth that can be further explored using pan and zoom interactions. Any canvas position can be saved and linked to in a closed drawn stroke, or “portal,” allowing the artist to create spatially discontinuous, or even infinitely looping visual trajectories. We provide three case studies and a gallery to demonstrate how artists can naturally incorporate these interactions to craft immersive comics, as well as re-purpose them to support use cases beyond drawing such as animation, slide-based presentations, web design, and digital journalism.

Vector illustrations are object-based, meaning they are composed of strokes that can be filtered individually through textures or animations and transformed without loss of quality. These filters are typically difficult to specify without programming prerequisites. We propose filtered.ink , a full-featured illustration application to construct and explore filters via a node graph interface with a live preview. This turns vector graphics and their filters into a form of vector hypermedia that can be shared and remixed with new users. By examining interactions that occur when crafting, remixing, and using filters for dynamic illustrations through a task-based usability study, we expose new workflow patterns and avenues of expression. The observations result in a user model supported by filtered.ink: see, want, rewant, and remix. In this model, the artist breaks away from traditional notions of illustration, taking advantage of the inherent remixability of the strokes and filters in the vector graphics format.

Free-hand interaction enables users to directly create artistic augmented reality content using a smartphone, but lacks natural spatial depth information due to the small 2D display’s limited visual feedback. Through an autobiographical design process, three authors explored free-hand drawing over a total of 14 weeks. During this process, they expanded the design space from a single-display smartphone format to a dual-display smartphone-wearable format (Portalware). This new configuration extends the virtual content from a smartphone to a wearable display and enables multi-display free-hand interactions. The authors documented experiences where 1) the display extends the smartphone’s canvas perceptually, allowing the authors to work beyond the smartphone screen view; 2) the additional perspective mitigates the difficulties of depth perception and improves the usability of direct free-hand manipulation; 3) the wearable use cases depend on the nature of the drawing, such as: replicating physical objects, “in-situ” mixed reality pieces, and multi-planar drawings.

Peer review has been used in both online and offline classrooms to inspire creativity, gather feedback, and lessen instructor grading loads, especially for design-based tasks without definitive rubrics. To explore the nuances and quality of peer feedback, we developed UX Factor, a peer grading platform that aims to characterize the behavior of peer reviews and the consistency of the ranking models used to aggregate these reviews. This system harnesses the power of pairwise comparisons to minimize bias and encourage context-driven analysis. We adopted UX Factor in a user interface course of 133 students and teaching assistants (TAs) across 3 different individual design projects over a semester and found that the system was effective in eliciting high-quality feedback. We saw that raters have higher agreement than random preferences, and with at least 15 ratings per submission, a simple average of ratings produced rankings that were consistent to both the raw ratings and other more complex models. These rankings were robust to disagreeable raters and changing class sizes, demonstrating the potential of comparative peer review to match the quality of expert feedback at scale.

As machine intelligence is increasingly incorporated into educational technologies, it becomes imperative for instructors and students to understand the potential flaws of the algorithms on which their systems rely. This paper describes the design and implementation of an interactive post-hoc explanation of the Bayesian Knowledge Tracing algorithm which is implemented in learning analytics systems used across the United States. After a user-centered design process to smooth out interaction design difficulties, we ran a controlled experiment to evaluate whether the interactive or static version of the explainable led to increased learning. Our results reveal that learning about an algorithm through an explainable depends on users' educational background. For other contexts, designers of post-hoc explainables must consider their users' educational background to best determine how to empower more informed decision-making with AI-enhanced systems.