Towards Intent-based User Interfaces: Charting the Design Space of Intent-AI Interactions Across Task Types

TL;DR

This paper explores the design space of intent-based user interfaces across various task types, aiming to enhance human-AI interaction by understanding and improving how users express their intentions in different contexts.

Contribution

It proposes a research framework for studying intent-AI interactions across diverse tasks, informing future UI designs for better user expression and AI collaboration.

Findings

Analyzed fixed-scope content curation tasks via news headline generation.

Explored atomic creative tasks through analogy generation.

Investigated complex tasks with visual data analysis.

Abstract

Technological advances continue to redefine the dynamics of human-machine interactions, particularly in task execution. This proposal responds to the advancements in Generative AI by outlining a research plan that probes intent-AI interaction across a diverse set of tasks: fixed-scope content curation task, atomic creative tasks, and complex and interdependent tasks. This exploration aims to inform and contribute to the development of Intent-based User Interface (IUI). The study is structured in three phases: examining fixed-scope tasks through news headline generation, exploring atomic creative tasks via analogy generation, and delving into complex tasks through exploratory visual data analysis. Future work will focus on improving IUIs to better provide suggestions to encourage experienced users to express broad and exploratory intents, and detailed and structured guidance for novice users to iterate on analysis intents for high quality outputs.