One common asset of metaverse is that users can freely explore places and actions without linear procedures. Thus, it is hard yet important to understand the divergent challenges each user faces when onboarding metaverse. Our formative study (N = 16) shows that first-time users ask questions about metaverse that concern 1) a short-term spatiotemporal context, regarding the user’s current location, recent conversation, and actions, and 2) a long-term exploration context regarding the user’s experience history. Based on the findings, we present PICAN, a Large Language Model-based pipeline that generates context-aware answers to users when onboarding metaverse. An ablation study (N = 20) reveals that PICAN’s usage of context made responses more useful and immersive than those generated without contexts. Furthermore, a user study (N = 21) shows that the use of long-term exploration context promotes users’ learning about the locations and activities within the virtual environment.

Graphic designers often get inspiration through the recombination of references. Our formative study (N=6) reveals that graphic designers focus on conceptual keywords during this process, and want support for discovering the keywords, expanding them, and exploring diverse recombination options of them, while still having room for designers’ creativity. We propose CreativeConnect, a system with generative AI pipelines that helps users discover useful elements from the reference image using keywords, recommends relevant keywords, generates diverse recombination options with user-selected keywords, and shows recombinations as sketches with text descriptions. Our user study (N=16) showed that CreativeConnect helped users discover keywords from the reference and generate multiple ideas based on them, ultimately helping users produce more design ideas with higher self-reported creativity, compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was shown effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.

Despite the growing demand for professional graphic design knowledge, the tacit nature of design inhibits knowledge sharing. However, there is a limited understanding on the characteristics and instances of tacit knowledge in graphic design. In this work, we build a comprehensive set of tacit knowledge characteristics through a literature review. Through interviews with 10 professional graphic designers, we collected 123 tacit knowledge instances and labeled their characteristics. By qualitatively coding the instances, we identified the prominent elements, actions, and purposes of tacit knowledge. To identify which instances have been addressed the least, we conducted a systematic literature review of prior system support to graphic design. By understanding the reasons for the lack of support on these instances based on their characteristics, we propose design guidelines for capturing and applying tacit knowledge in design tools. This work takes a step towards understanding tacit knowledge, and how this knowledge can be communicated.

Designers rely on visual search to explore and develop ideas in early design stages. However, designers can struggle to identify suitable text queries to initiate a search or to discover images for similarity-based search that can adequately express their intent. We propose GenQuery, a novel system that integrates generative models into the visual search process. GenQuery can automatically elaborate on users’ queries and surface concrete search directions when users only have abstract ideas. To support precise expression of search intents, the system enables users to generatively modify images and use these in similarity-based search. In a comparative user study (N=16), designers felt that they could more accurately express their intents and find more satisfactory outcomes with GenQuery compared to a tool without generative features. Furthermore, the unpredictability of generations allowed participants to uncover more diverse outcomes. By supporting both convergence and divergence, GenQuery led to a more creative experience.

Video is an effective medium for learning procedural knowledge, such as surgical techniques. However, learning procedural knowledge through videos remains difficult due to limited access to procedural structures of knowledge (e.g., compositions and ordering of steps) in a large-scale video dataset. We present Surch, a system that enables structural search and comparison of surgical procedures. Surch supports video search based on procedural graphs generated by our clustering workflow capturing latent patterns within surgical procedures. We used vectorization and weighting schemes that characterize the features of procedures, such as recursive structures and unique paths. Surch enhances cross-video comparison by providing video navigation synchronized by surgical steps. Evaluation of the workflow demonstrates the effectiveness and interpretability (Silhouette score = 0.82) of our clustering for surgical learning. A user study with 11 residents shows that our system significantly improves the learning experience and task efficiency of video search and comparison, especially benefiting junior residents.

End-users can potentially style and customize websites by editing them through in-browser developer tools. Unfortunately, end-users lack the knowledge needed to translate high-level styling goals into low-level code edits. We present Stylette, a browser extension that enables users to change the style of websites by expressing goals in natural language. By interpreting the user’s goal with a large language model and extracting suggestions from our dataset of 1.7 million web components, Stylette generates a palette of CSS properties and values that the user can apply to reach their goal. A comparative study (N=40) showed that Stylette lowered the learning curve, helping participants perform styling changes 35% faster than those using developer tools. By presenting various alternatives for a single goal, the tool helped participants familiarize themselves with CSS through experimentation. Beyond CSS, our work can be expanded to help novices quickly grasp complex software or programming languages.

Digital intervention tools against problematic smartphone usage help users control their consumption on smartphones, for example, by setting a time limit on an app. However, today's social media apps offer a mix of quasiessential and addictive features in an app (e.g., Instagram has following feeds, recommended feeds, stories, and direct messaging features), which makes it hard to apply a uniform logic for all uses of an app without a nuanced understanding of feature-level usage behaviors. We study when and why people regret using different features of social media apps on smartphones. We examine regretful feature uses in four smartphone social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and KakaoTalk) by utilizing feature usage logs, ESM surveys on regretful use collected for a week, and retrospective interviews from 29 Android users. In determining whether a feature use is regretful, users considered different types of rewards they obtained from using a certain feature (i.e., social, informational, personal interests, and entertainment) as well as alternative rewards they could have gained had they not used the smartphone (e.g., productivity). Depending on the types of rewards and the way rewards are presented to users, probabilities to regret vary across features of the same app. We highlight three patterns of features with different characteristics that lead to regretful use. First, "following"-based features (e.g., Facebook's News Feed and Instagram's Following Posts and Stories) induce habitual checking and quickly deplete rewards from app use. Second, recommendation-based features situated close to actively used features (e.g., Instagram's Suggested Posts adjacent to Search) cause habitual feature tour and sidetracking from the original intention of app use. Third, recommendation-based features with bite-sized contents (e.g., Facebook's Watch Videos) induce using "just a bit more," making people fall into prolonged use. We discuss implications of our findings for how social media apps and intervention tools can be designed to reduce regretful use and how feature-level usage information can strengthen self-reflection and behavior changes.