Spacewalker: Rapid UI Design Exploration Using Lightweight Markup Enhancement and Crowd Genetic Programming
This addresses the challenge for UI designers in efficiently searching and optimizing web interfaces, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing genetic algorithms and crowd-sourcing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of exploring a large design space for web UI optimization by introducing Spacewalker, a tool that uses lightweight markup and crowd genetic programming to generate and evaluate UI configurations, enabling designers to rapidly improve designs at minimal cost.
User interface design is a complex task that involves designers examining a wide range of options. We present Spacewalker, a tool that allows designers to rapidly search a large design space for an optimal web UI with integrated support. Designers first annotate each attribute they want to explore in a typical HTML page, using a simple markup extension we designed. Spacewalker then parses the annotated HTML specification, and intelligently generates and distributes various configurations of the web UI to crowd workers for evaluation. We enhanced a genetic algorithm to accommodate crowd worker responses from pairwise comparison of UI designs, which is crucial for obtaining reliable feedback. Based on our experiments, Spacewalker allows designers to effectively search a large design space of a UI, using the language they are familiar with, and improve their design rapidly at a minimal cost.