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：交互系统通过提供示例可提升问题解决表现，但此类系统的设计者在制定用户与示例交互的具体方案时，常因缺乏明确理论指导而面临诸多实际设计决策。为探究示例交互设计选择如何影响人们从示例中获益的程度与方式，我们开展了一项实验：182名参与者在可访问不同多样性示例及不同呈现界面条件下，完成了一项可控的类比探索性创造力任务。结果显示，与将示例嵌入探索空间或以下拉列表形式呈现相比，以列表形式呈现示例时任务表现更差。列表式示例更易引发思维固化，而情境化示例则有助于参与者将示例用于构建问题空间模型以指导探索。本文探讨了这些结果对理论框架的启示——该框架将设计选择与示例激发创造力的基本心理机制相关联。