Designing with interactive example galleries

Designers often use examples for inspiration; examples offer contextualized instances of how form and content integrate. Can interactive example galleries bring this practice to everyday users doing design work, and does working with examples help the designs they create? This paper explores whether people can realize significant value from explicit mechanisms for designing by example modification. We present the results of three studies, finding that independent raters prefer designs created with the aid of examples, that examples may benefit novices more than experienced designers, that users prefer adaptively selected examples to random ones, and that users make use of multiple examples when creating new designs. To enable these studies and demonstrate how software tools can facilitate designing with examples, we introduce interface techniques for browsing and borrowing from a corpus of examples, manifest in the Adaptive Ideas Web design tool. Adaptive Ideas leverages a faceted metadata interface for viewing and navigating example galleries.