Rewire: Interface Design Assistance from Examples

Abstract

Interface designers often use screenshot images of example designs as building blocks for new designs. Since images are unstructured and hard to edit, designers typically reconstruct screenshots with vector graphics tools in order to reuse or edit parts of the design. Unfortunately, this reconstruction process is tedious and slow. We present Rewire, an interactive system that helps designers leverage example screenshots. Rewire automatically infers a vector representation of screenshots where each UI component is a separate object with editable shape and style properties. Based on this representation, the system provides three design assistance modes that help designers reuse or redraw components of the example design. The results from our quantitative and user evaluations demonstrate that Rewire can generate accurate vector representations of interface screenshots found in the wild and that design assistance enables users to reconstruct and edit example designs more efficiently compared to a baseline design tool.