Interactive Layout Transfer

Abstract

During the design of graphical user interfaces (GUIs), one typical objective is to ensure compliance with pertinent style guides, ongoing design practices, and design systems. However, designing compliant layouts is challenging, time-consuming, and can distract creative thinking in design. This paper presents a method for interactive layout transfer, where the layout of a source design-typically an initial rough working draft-is transferred automatically using a selected reference/template layout while complying with relevant guidelines. Our integer programming (IP) method extends previous work in two ways: First, by showing how to transform a rough draft into the final target layout using a reference template and, second, by extending IP-based approaches to adhere to guidelines. We demonstrate how to integrate the method into a real-time interactive GUI sketching tool. Evaluation results are presented from a case study and from an online experiment where the perceived quality of layouts was assessed.