Scout: Rapid Exploration of Interface Layout Alternatives through High-Level Design Constraints

Although exploring alternatives is fundamental to creating better interface designs, current processes for creating alternatives are generally manual, limiting the alternatives a designer can explore. We present Scout, a system that helps designers rapidly explore alternatives through mixed-initiative interaction with high-level constraints and design feedback. Prior constraint-based layout systems use low-level spatial constraints and generally produce a single design. To support designer exploration of alternatives, Scout introduces high-level constraints based on design concepts (e.g., semantic structure, emphasis, order) and formalizes them into low-level spatial constraints that a solver uses to generate potential layouts. In an evaluation with 18 interface designers, we found that Scout: (1) helps designers create more spatially diverse mobile interface layouts with similar quality to those created with a baseline tool and (2) can help designers avoid a linear design process and quickly ideate layouts they do not believe they would have thought of on their own.