Sketchy: Drawing Inspiration from the Crowd

In-person user studies show that designers draw inspiration by looking at their peers' work while sketching. To recreate this behavior in a virtual environment, we developed Sketchy, a web-based drawing application where users sketch in virtual rooms and use the "Peek'' functionality to gain ideas from their peers' sketches in real-time. To assess if "Peek'' supports individual creativity through finding inspiration, students from a Human-Computer Interaction class sketched user interface design tasks in two studies. Study 1 compares creativity measures with and without Peek between two groups of students, where self-reports reveal Peek increases satisfaction with their final sketch and better supports individual creativity. Study 2 took place in a large classroom, where 90 students, all with Peek enabled, completed different design tasks. Peeking led students to report an intention to change their sketch 18% of the time in Study 1 and 17% of the time in Study 2. Student designers were influenced by sketches that seem closer to completion, contain more details, and are carefully drawn. They were also about three times more likely to clear their canvas and start over if they found a sketch inspirational. Furthermore, sketches created by students with more sketching and design experience influence less experienced student designers. This work explores the directions and benefits of incorporating digital peeking to support individual creativity within a student designer's classroom experience to create more satisfactory final sketches.