Visual guides for comprehending digital ink in distortion lenses

We devised and tested two new visual guides to help users comprehend distorted sketched information in magnification lenses. Distortion techniques, such as fisheye lenses, have the advantage of magnifying information without occluding the surrounding content. However distorted information in the transition region requires extra mental workload to understand: this can lead to frustration and rejection of magnification lenses. Our evaluation shows any visual guide is better than none and identifies strengths and weaknesses of the new guides. We tested for the four visual properties important for understanding distorted information: scale, alignment, distance and direction. Surprisingly grids are not as effective in many contexts as our new lenses.