Coherent visual design through attribute-specific feedback: a hybrid approach to intelligent design agents

The scope of visual design is expanding to promote products and services across digital communication platforms, but support for coherent design with style guides seems limited. Based on the literature on style, coherence and design support tools with different levels of intelligence, we describe coherence in visual design and propose to integrate preset style guidelines and constraints into feedback interactions to support achieving visual coherence. After formative research with expert designers, we prototype a pseudo-AI design support tool to simulate attribute-specific feedback and conduct user research to probe how participants engage with feedback provided by a human wizard acting as an intelligent agent. We analyze patterns of feedback and types of reactions observed in participants’ design processes and outcomes. We then discuss the implications of attribute-specific feedback to describe visual coherence as a meta-property of design, and intelligent agents that guide situational judgements about visual coherence through feedback interactions.