Cultivating Creativity in UI/UX Design

Understanging How Designers Perceive AI as a Creative Partner in the Divergent Thinking Stages of UI/UX Design

Divergent thinking, a process of generating multiple ideas, exploring alternatives, and approaching problems from different perspectives, is a fundamental driver of innovation in UI/UX design. While prior research has examined AI’s role in automating design tasks, there is a critical gap in understanding how AI specifically influences divergent thinking during early-stage creative activities.

To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 professional UI/UX designers, examining their current use of AI and perceptions of its role in creative processes. Participants reported using AI-based tools to support research, generate ideas, and create prototypes. Designers emphasized that AI is most valuable when it offers control over the ideation process, facilitates collaboration, enhances efficiency to free up creative thinking, and aligns with their visual habits.

Our analysis identified four key roles AI plays in supporting divergent thinking. First, it aids research by quickly synthesizing user and competitive information. Second, it kick-starts creativity by providing inspiration and reducing fixation. Third, AI helps generate design alternatives, enabling exploration of multiple directions. Fourth, it enables hi-fidelity prototyping by generating realistic representations that help stakeholders provide actionable feedback and insights, guiding designers during early-stage ideation and exploration.

Overall, this study provides actionable insights into the evolving role of AI in supporting divergent thinking in UI/UX design. The findings inform the design of AI-powered tools that enhance creativity, support exploration, and empower designers during their creative workflows.

Supporting UI/UX Design Ideation Under Constraints using AI

UI/UX designers regularly work under constraints like brand identity, industry standards, and business requirements. Yet current tools for finding or generating design inspiration do not account for these constraints, leaving designers to sift through irrelevant examples or wrestle with prompt-based AI tools that produce inconsistent results.

We first ran an exploratory interview study with experienced designers to understand how they handle constraints in practice. We found that designers view constraints differently: some see them as limiting, others as useful starting points. From these findings, we created three designer personas and five design considerations, which guided the development of UIDEC (UI Design Exploration under Constraints). UIDEC is a LLM powered tool that lets designers specify project details (such as purpose, audience, industry, and style) through structured inputs rather than open-ended prompts. It then generates diverse design examples that respect those constraints. Designers can regenerate specific UI components, browse different versions, and organize ideas on a canvas.

We evaluated UIDEC with ten designers representing our three personas. Participants found it compatible with their existing workflows and useful for creative inspiration, especially when starting new projects. They reported that it reduced irrelevant exploration and made ideation more efficient. We contribute an understanding of how designers ideate under constraints and provide design implications for future AI tools that support this process.

Immersive Design Workflows: Mixed Reality for Integrating Physical and Digital Artifacts

In today’s UI/UX design process, designers use both physical and digital artifacts during early ideation. Physical artifacts such as paper sketches enable quick, freeform exploration, while digital tools offer precision, scalability and collaboration. However, current tools fail to integrate these workflows and remain fragmented, forcing designers to switch between physical and digital environments which disrupt their creative flow.

Mixed Reality (MR) serves as a promising medium to address this gap by combining both physical and digital environments in an immersive unified environment. To investigate this, we organized nine design workshops in which designers engaged with a conceptual probe that augmented paper-based sketching with digital content in a mixed reality environment. During these workshops, participants also brainstormed and explored how MR technologies could support future UI/UX design practices.

Our findings indicated that designers value MR for enabling rapid ideation, spatial organization of design artifacts, and collaborative exploration of ideas. Participants also envisioned future MR systems that incorporate AI assistance, multimedia design resources, and integration with existing design platforms. Based on these insights, we identify five key design dimensions that can guide the development of mixed reality systems supporting immersive design workflows.

A Collaborative Mixed Reality Brainsketching Platform (ongoing)

Early-stage design activities such as brainstorming and ideation are critical for generating innovative UI/UX concepts. One widely used technique is brainsketching, where designers individually sketch ideas and then pass them to others who extend and refine the concepts over multiple rounds. This iterative process encourages collaborative creativity and helps teams build upon each other’s ideas. However, traditional brainsketching primarily relies on physical sketches, which limits opportunities for digital augmentation, remote collaboration, and structured creative support.

To address these limitations, we are developing BrainSketch Studio, a mixed reality (MR) collaborative platform that enables designers to interact with both physical sketches and AI-based digital content simultaneously. The system supports collaborative ideation sessions, allowing designers to iterate on ideas, view evolving concepts, and build on each other’s work. Additional features include AI-powered visual inspiration, alternative design generation, and spatial annotations for targeted feedback.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the system, we will conduct a user study with professional UI/UX designers. The study will investigate how mixed reality can enhance collaborative brainsketching and support the generation of creative ideas. The expected contributions of this work include (1) the design and implementation of a mixed reality system for collaborative brainsketching, (2) empirical insights from a user study on how MR supports brainsketching workflows, and (3) design implications for future mixed reality tools that aim to support creative idea generation in UI/UX design.