Data from "Visual Design Tools in Support of Novice Designers"

Today, there is a proliferation of tools to meet the growing and evolving needs of professional designers. However, professional designers are not the only people participating in design. Novice designers are also increasingly taking part by creating flyers, websites, and presentations, but are forced to do so using either professional design tools or simplistic template-based tools. There exists an opportunity with these users to create design tools that cater to their specific abilities and tasks. In this dissertation, I describe some fundamental work I undertook to understand novices' ability to recognize visual appeal. I then discuss four different design tools I developed to assist novices in their creative tasks.

The first of these tools, Poirot, a web inspector tool, was built to help designers make changes to websites as they complete their work as novice end-user programmers. In an evaluation of Poirot compared to Chrome DevTools, Poirot led to higher task completion rates, faster task completion times, a lower perceived cognitive load, and was preferred by designers.

The three remaining tools are a series of user-steered, generative design tools, a new category of visual design tools that attempt to combine the natural abilities of novice designers with the power of computational design. The purpose of these tools is to allow novice designers to take greater part in the design process, experience an increase in their perceived creativity, and produce unique, high-quality designs all without increasing the burden of using the design tool. We formally evaluated the final of these design tools, DesignQ, a user-steered, generative design tool for creating flyers. Compared to Canva—a popular novice flyer design tool— novice designers felt better supported in their creative flyer design task and their perceived cognitive load was lower when using DesignQ, while there was no significant difference in the quality of the designs produced.