Formulating or Fixating: Effects of Examples on Problem Solving Vary as a Function of Example Presentation Interface Design

TL;DR

The paper investigates how the presentation interface of examples and their diversity affect exploratory creative problem solving. Using the WildCat Wells task, it manipulates three interfaces (In-Context, List, Dropdown) and two levels of example diversity (HD/LD) to observe effects on solution quality and strategy use. Key findings show that List-style presentation lowers final scores and fosters stimulation-based, hill-climbing exploration, while In-Context presentation promotes model-based problem reformulation; diversity enhances performance similarly across interfaces. The authors argue for an interaction-oriented theory linking design choices to psychological mechanisms of inspiration, with practical guidance for crafting example-based creativity support systems and a framework for evaluating interface designs beyond usability alone.

Abstract

Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples, with little clear theoretical guidance. To understand how example interaction design choices affect whether/how people benefit from examples, we conducted an experiment where 182 participants worked on a controlled analog to an exploratory creativity task, with access to examples of varying diversity and presentation interfaces. Task performance was worse when examples were presented in a list, compared to contextualized in the exploration space or shown in a dropdown list. Example lists were associated with more fixation, whereas contextualized examples were associated with using examples to formulate a model of the problem space to guide exploration. We discuss implications of these results for a theoretical framework that maps design choices to fundamental psychological mechanisms of creative inspiration from examples.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Example Wildcat Wells search environment with color coding of points to indicate their scores (0-50: dark blue to light blue, 50-100: light red to dark red) (A), and example sets of high and low diversity sets of points in this search environment, which are given as examples (B).
• Figure 2: Screenshot of experimental interface, shown for the List condition: the 100x100 grid, which constituted the search environment for the task, was shown on the left panel: participants explored the space by clicking anywhere on the 100x100 grid. The 10 initial examples, moves remaining, the score of current move, the current max score and score legend were shown on the right panel. In the Dropdown condition, the dropdown menu as seen in Figure \ref{['fig:3interfaces']} was shown in the same position as the list of examples in the List condition. In the In-Context condition, examples were instead overlaid as points, with corresponding values, on the search grid, as shown in Figure \ref{['fig:3interfaces']}.
• Figure 3: Three conditions of presenting examples: "In-Context" (directly on the search environment grid), "List" (in a list) and "Dropdown" (in a clickable dropdown selector).
• Figure 4: Distribution of best scores by interface and example diversity conditions. Participants in the List interface condition had lower best scores than participants in the other interface conditions regardless of example diversity (top right). Best scores were also lower when participants were given low vs. high diversity examples (bottom right).
• Figure 5: Maximum score at n-th move for each participant: left) HD; right) LD. We observe (1) cumulative disadvantages for the List condition, as well as (2) early advantages for the In-Context interface, especially with LD examples.