Misty: UI Prototyping Through Interactive Conceptual Blending

TL;DR

Misty introduces a novel UI prototyping workflow inspired by conceptual blending, enabling developers to incorporate diverse design elements from examples, fostering creativity and flexibility in early-stage UI development.

Contribution

The paper presents Misty, a new tool that applies cognitive-inspired conceptual blending to improve UI prototyping workflows for developers.

Findings

Misty helps developers explore creative UI options.

It allows flexible specification of design intent.

The workflow inspires serendipitous UI combinations.

Abstract

UI prototyping often involves iterating and blending elements from examples such as screenshots and sketches, but current tools offer limited support for incorporating these examples. Inspired by the cognitive process of conceptual blending, we introduce a novel UI workflow that allows developers to rapidly incorporate diverse aspects from design examples into work-in-progress UIs. We prototyped this workflow as Misty. Through an exploratory first-use study with 14 frontend developers, we assessed Misty's effectiveness and gathered feedback on this workflow. Our findings suggest that Misty's conceptual blending workflow helps developers kickstart creative explorations, flexibly specify intent in different stages of prototyping, and inspires developers through serendipitous UI blends. Misty demonstrates the potential for tools that blur the boundaries between developers and designers.