Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples, with little clear theoretical guidance. To understand how example interaction design choices affect whether/how people benefit from examples, we conducted an experiment where 182 participants worked on a controlled analog to an exploratory creativity task, with access to examples of varying diversity and presentation interfaces. Task performance was worse when examples were presented in a list, compared to contextualized in the exploration space or shown in a dropdown list. Example lists were associated with more fixation, whereas contextualized examples were associated with using examples to formulate a model of the problem space to guide exploration. We discuss implications of these results for a theoretical framework that maps design choices to fundamental psychological mechanisms of creative inspiration from examples.

翻译：促进示例接触的交互系统能够增强问题解决表现。然而，这类系统的设计者往往面临诸多关于用户如何与示例交互的实际设计决策，却缺乏清晰的理论指导。为探究示例交互设计选择如何影响人们从示例中获益的方式与程度，我们开展了一项实验：182名参与者在受控条件下完成一项类比于探索性创造力任务的工作，其间可接触不同多样性程度的示例及不同呈现界面。当示例以列表形式呈现时，任务表现劣于将示例嵌入探索空间或以下拉列表形式呈现的情况。示例列表与更高的思维固化相关，而情境化示例则与利用示例构建问题空间模型以指导探索相关联。我们讨论了这些结果对理论框架的启示，该框架将设计选择映射至示例创造性启发的基本心理机制。