Dancing With Chains: Ideating Under Constraints With UIDEC in UI/UX Design

TL;DR

This paper explores how constraints influence UI/UX design ideation and introduces UIDEC, a GenAI tool that generates diverse design ideas aligned with specified project constraints, enhancing creativity support.

Contribution

It presents the design and evaluation of UIDEC, a GenAI-powered tool that supports UI/UX designers in ideation under constraints, based on insights from designer personas.

Findings

UIDEC is compatible with existing ideation processes.

Designers found UIDEC useful for creative inspiration.

Constraints influence designer preferences and tool effectiveness.

Abstract

UI/UX designers often work under constraints like brand identity, design norms, and industry guidelines. How these constraints impact designers' ideation and exploration processes should be addressed in creativity-support tools for design. Through an exploratory interview study, we identified three designer personas with varying views on having constraints in the ideation process, which guided the creation of UIDEC, a GenAI-powered tool for supporting creativity under constraints. UIDEC allows designers to specify project details, such as purpose, target audience, industry, and design styles, based on which it generates diverse design examples that adhere to these constraints, with minimal need to write prompts. In a user evaluation involving designers representing the identified personas, participants found UIDEC compatible with their existing ideation process and useful for creative inspiration, especially when starting new projects. Our work provides design implications to AI-powered tools that integrate constraints during UI/UX design ideation to support creativity.