Research project title
Creative inspiration in UI/UX design leveraging data-driven approaches
Education level
Master or doctorate
Director/co-director
Director: Jinghui Cheng
Co-director(s): Prof. Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau (Polytechnique Montréal) , Prof. Jin Guo (McGill University)
End of display
May 6, 2023
Areas of expertise
Unit(s) and department(s)
Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering
Detailed description
As interactive software systems increasingly make impacts on both the daily lives of a vast population and society as a whole, UI/UX design becomes a crucial and challenging activity. Gaining inspiration from existing design examples allows designers to follow important design conventions and activate essential creativity mechanisms of transforming, combining, and adapting elements from previous design ideas. This process has incubated important design innovations and continues to be a crucial aspect of successful UI/UX design. Although existing work has explored methods for retrieving and recommending design examples, most relied on similarity-based techniques. However, overexposure to examples with similar styles often results in "design fixation" that hinders creativity. Additionally, looking for inspirational examples that at the same time satisfy predefined constraints and requirements is also challenging.
In this project, we address these challenges by investigating a data-driven framework for providing diverse, relevant, and novel design examples that are relevant to the designers’ immediate work and at the same time support serendipitous creativity. In particular, we focus on (1) computer vision-based image comparison and generation techniques for extracting and recommending image-based design examples, (2) text-image traceability techniques that incorporate design constraints imposed by software requirements, and (3) eventually, a designer-centered tool that incorporates the designers' inspirational needs and the technical advances to support the creative UI/UX design process.
The HCDLab (https://jhcheng.me/lab/) of Polytechnique Montreal is searching for PhD or master's students for this and several other projects. Prospective students should have a marked interest in human-computer interaction and user-centered research. Interested applicants should contact Prof. Jinghui Cheng at jinghui.cheng@polymtl.ca. In the application package, please include (1) a CV, (2) a cover letter describing your research interests and previous research experiences, and (3) school transcript.
Financing possibility
Financial support is available.
Jinghui Cheng
Associate Professor
