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

Atefeh Shokrizadeh, Boniface Bahati Tadjuidje, Shivam Kumar, Sohan Kamble, Jinghui Cheng

TL;DR

The paper investigates how constraints influence UI/UX ideation and introduces UIDEC, a GenAI-driven tool that generates, edits, and organizes design ideas conditioned on explicit project constraints. Through an exploratory study and three personas, the authors define five design considerations and implement a constrained ideation workflow with a multimodal LLM that outputs HTML prototypes. A subsequent user study demonstrates UIDEC's compatibility with designers' workflows, its potential to accelerate early-stage ideation, and its ability to produce constraint-adherent, diverse design ideas. The work highlights practical implications for integrating constraints into AI-powered design tools, while discussing limitations and directions for future research, such as enhanced collaboration, richer visuals, and broader evaluations across real-world contexts.

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.

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

TL;DR

The paper investigates how constraints influence UI/UX ideation and introduces UIDEC, a GenAI-driven tool that generates, edits, and organizes design ideas conditioned on explicit project constraints. Through an exploratory study and three personas, the authors define five design considerations and implement a constrained ideation workflow with a multimodal LLM that outputs HTML prototypes. A subsequent user study demonstrates UIDEC's compatibility with designers' workflows, its potential to accelerate early-stage ideation, and its ability to produce constraint-adherent, diverse design ideas. The work highlights practical implications for integrating constraints into AI-powered design tools, while discussing limitations and directions for future research, such as enhanced collaboration, richer visuals, and broader evaluations across real-world contexts.

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 52 sections, 1 equation, 7 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Constraints and Creativity in Design
  4. Tools for Design Inspiration
  5. Generative Models for UI Creation
  6. Exploratory Interview Study
  7. Interview Methods
  8. Interview Results
  9. Constraints encountered by designers.
  10. Effects of content-based constraints on the design process.
  11. Factors affecting the perception of content-based constraints:
  12. Designers' perception towards AI tools for design under constraints.
  13. Personas and Design Considerations
  14. UIDEC Design and Implementation
  15. Design and Implementation Process
  16. ...and 37 more sections

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: UIDEC interaction workflow 1: generating the design examples
  • Figure 2: UIDEC interaction workflow 2: editing the design examples
  • Figure 3: UIDEC interaction workflow 3: organizing the design examples
  • Figure 4: Examples of the generated designs when varying a specific constraint while keeping others constant
  • Figure 5: Designer persona: Eric the experienced designer
  • ...and 2 more figures