Relative Design Acquisition: A Computational Approach for Creating Visual Interfaces to Steer User Choices

A central objective in computational design is that an optimal design is desired which optimizes a performance metric. We explore a different problem class with a computational approach we call relative design acquisition. As a motivational example, consider a user prompted to make a choice using buttons. One button may have a more visually appealing design and hence is visually optimal to steer users to click it more often than the second button. In such a design case, a relative design is acquired of a certain quality with respect to a reference design to guide a user decision. After mathematically formalizing this problem, we report the results of three experiments that demonstrate the approach’s efficacy in generating relative designs in a visual interface preference setting. The relative designs are controllable by a quality factor, which affects both comparative ratings and human decision time between the reference and relative designs.