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 that allows users to create sketches 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 UI design tasks in two studies. The first study compared 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. The second study 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 17% of the time in Study 1 and 18% of the time in Study 2. Results show that student designers were influenced by sketches that seem closer to completion, contain more details, and are carefully drawn. Also, sketches created by students with more sketching and design experience influence less experienced student designers. This work explores directions for how to incorporate digital peeking to support individual creativity within a student designer's classroom experience to create more satisfactory final sketches.