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

2025-01-30

AI Summary

Brand guidelines, design principles, and industry constraints often stifle early-stage creativity in UI/UX design. Method: This paper introduces UIDEC, a GenAI-driven creative support tool that explicitly models design constraints as generative guidance mechanisms—enabled by the first taxonomy of three designer personas derived from empirical analysis of constraint perception—and integrates prompt engineering optimization, constraint-aware fine-tuning, and context-driven multimodal generation to achieve zero-shot style alignment and low-prompt-dependency interaction. Contribution/Results: User evaluation demonstrates that UIDEC significantly improves ideation efficiency; 92% of participants confirmed seamless integration into existing workflows, and the tool effectively stimulates innovative, constraint-compliant design inspiration.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects and information design of Web, GenAI, and cloud computing
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

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.

Problem

• UI/UX Design
• Creative Inspiration
• Design Rules

Innovation

• UIDEC
• AI-assisted design
• Rule-based creativity