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Neat: a set of flexible tools and gestures for layout tasks on interactive displays

Published: 13 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Creating accurate layouts of graphical objects is an important activity in many graphics applications, such as design tools, presentation software or diagram editors. In this paper, we are contributing Natural and Effective Layout Techniques (Neat). The system provides a consistent set of multi-touch tools and gestures for aligning and distributing graphical objects on interactive surfaces. NEAT explicitly considers expert requirements and supports a rich and consistent set of layout functions. Amongst others, it minimizes visual distraction by layout tools, combines separate steps of interaction to compound ones and allows effective interaction by combining multi-touch and pen input. Furthermore, Neat provides a set of bimanual gestures for achieving layout tasks in a quick and effective way without explicitly invoking any tools. From initial expert user feedback we derive several principles for layout tools on interactive displays.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITS '11: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
    November 2011
    295 pages
    ISBN:9781450308717
    DOI:10.1145/2076354
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 13 November 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. alignment
    2. bimanual interaction
    3. constraints
    4. expert mode
    5. gestures
    6. multi-touch
    7. pen input
    8. tabletops

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    ITS'11: Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
    November 13 - 16, 2011
    Kobe, Japan

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    • (2022)Group-based Object Alignment in Virtual Reality EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2022 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3565970.3567682(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
    • (2022)A systematic mapping study on usability and user eXperience evaluation of multi-touch systemsProceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3554364.3559131(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
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    • (2017)Beyond GridsProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025718(5053-5064)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
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