Searching for design examples with crowdsourcing

Abstract

Examples are very important in design, but existing tools for design examples search still do not cover many cases. Long tail queries containing subtle and subjective design concepts, like "calm and quiet", "elegant", "dark background with a hint of color to make it less boring", are poorly supported. It is due to the inherent complexity of the task, which so far has been tackled only algorithmically using general image search techniques. We propose an approach for design examples search based on crowdsourcing. Out of many explored crowdsourcing configurations we found that (1) a design need should be represented via three query images, (2) crowd workers should assess the query-specific relevance of candidate examples from a pre-built design collection, and (3) a crowd task should contain verification questions about a design need to control quality. To test the utility of our approach, we compared it with Google Images in a queryby-example mode. Based on feedback from expert designers, the crowd selects more relevant and diverse design examples.

Crowdsourcing for search engines: perspectives and challenges

“…Digle, DataSift (Parameswaran et al, 2014) and CrowdSearcher (Bozzon et al, 2012a) are major solutions that provide users with crowd-searched findings of desired topics. Following this idea, the people's power have been leveraged in previous inspirational studies (Jeong et al, 2013;Spirin, 2014) for answering twitter questions and finding design examples, respectively. The obtained results in this approach may be used for further managerial processes, such as query interpretation.…”