ReFinE: Streamlining UI Mockup Iteration with Research Findings
This work addresses the gap between research and design practice for UI designers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tools and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designers struggling to apply HCI research insights in UI mockup workflows by developing ReFinE, a Figma plugin that surfaces contextualized insights, resulting in reduced cognitive load and improved integration of research evidence.
Although HCI research papers offer valuable design insights, designers often struggle to apply them in design workflows due to difficulties in finding relevant literature, understanding technical jargon, the lack of contextualization, and limited actionability. To address these challenges, we present ReFinE, a Figma plugin that supports real-time design iteration by surfacing contextualized insights from research papers. ReFinE identifies and synthesizes design implications from HCI literature relevant to the mockup's design context, and tailors this research evidence to a specific design mockup by providing actionable visual guidance on how to update the mockup. To assess the system's effectiveness, we conducted a technical evaluation and a user study. Results show that ReFinE effectively synthesizes and contextualizes design implications, reducing cognitive load and improving designers' ability to integrate research evidence into UI mockups. This work contributes to bridging the gap between research and design practice by presenting a tool for embedding scholarly insights into the UI design process.