Enhanced visual authoring using operation history

Graphical editors have introduced great flexibility to the designer's workflow, providing powerful digital tools and enabling the creation of complex and compelling designs. This thesis presents methods for improving these interactions by leveraging operation history. Much instrumentation and activity logging in software has been for the purpose of debugging, that is, for the benefit of the programmer or analyst. Our work addresses the mining of operation history for the benefit of the end user. We present three main contributions in this area. First, we introduce selection expansion, a method for facilitating the reuse of complex multiple-itemselections by identifying items that are likely to be edited together. We then discuss an extension of this work, soft grouping, which gives users more control than standard selection and more flexibility than standard grouping. Finally, we present an interactive visualization of operation history, interactive storyboards, which enables in-context browsing and manipulation of operation history. We demonstrate these approaches in the context of vector graphics editing and present the results of pilot studies using our software implementation. While this thesis focuses on the usage patterns of graphic designers, many of the strategies could be generalized to other domains.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Su, Sara Lee, 1982-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Frédo Durand.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/52805

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/52805