My favorite part of excalidraw over any other drawing tool is the messiness. With regular line and shape tools I end up obsessing over geometric precision and symmetry, with excalidraw it’s impossible to create “perfect” drawings, so I don’t worry about it (within reason). I wonder if this phenomenon has been named or observed in UX/game design because it’s so darn effective at making me productive when drawing.
It's called artists impression in building architecture. good enough to give you an impression of what it will become, without the suggestion of 100% correctness. You can see the same technique being used in UX, but it also works for IT architecture drawings.
I think it's what attracted people to Balsamiq vs. Axure and other products as well.
Because it kinda looks like a child's work it takes off the edge of noticing useless details and carries the intent better.
The same can be said about Lorem Ipsum vs. "real text". If you put real text, whoever is looking at it analyses things beyond the point you're trying to get across. People notice unbalanced text and typos and all you wanted to say was "there is going to be text here."
I do something similar with laptop stickers; it’s hard to place a sticker horizontally or vertically centered with no “tilt” so I’ll intentionally put it off center with some tilt.
The way excalidraw does it, it collects all the points from mouse-move events, then uses the algorithm to take those points and reduce the number of points. The reduction is done by a 'distance' parameter in the algorithm. So instead of `n` points, you now have `m` points. m < n. Then excalidraw fits a rough curve through those `m` points. This fitting is automatically done in roughjs. Fewer points and curve fitting gives the effect you mentioned.
I'm a product designer, and I've adopted Excalidraw as a daily tool in my workflow. It's wonderful for quick iterative exploration and collaboration with the rest of my team. Like another commenter mentioned, the messiness—or rather, variability—of the lines makes it much easier to focus on the ideas, concepts, and relationships over any level of refined design.
I've been doing this for more than 10 years and it's the first tool that achieves the same exploratory and collaborative outcomes as an actual whiteboard.
If you can't use online hosted tools (e.g. using it for work) there is a VSCode extension that embeds this which is pretty great. The latest version is actually broken but you can just install the previous one.
Love this tool! Discovered it just before the lockdown started and have used it as a collaboration tool in 100+ software engineering interviews since then.
