Some preliminary work has been done on subjects’ preference for different aesthetics in UML class and collaboration diagrams (Purchase et al. 2000), revealing that users preferred diagrams with fewer bends and crosses, shorter edge lengths and an orthogonal structure. However, that experiment only looked at subjects’ personal preference for the aesthetics, rather than their performance on UML related tasks. This paper describes two experiments that aimed to determine which graph drawing aesthetics are most important for the display of UML class diagrams, not with respect to computational efficiency, designers’ preference, or even subjects’ preference, but with respect to the extent to which the aesthetics produce diagrams that are easy for subjects to understand. The.
