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The overview-detail design pattern, characterized by an overview of multiple items and a detailed view of a selected item, is ubiquitously implemented across software interfaces. Designers often try to account for all users, but ultimately these interfaces settle on a single form. For instance, an overview map may display hotel prices but omit other user-desired attributes. This research instead explores the malleable overview-detail interface, one that end-users can customize to address individual needs. Our content analysis of overview-detail interfaces uncovered three dimensions of variation: content, composition, and layout, enabling us to develop customization techniques along these dimensions. For content, we developed Fluid Attributes, a set of techniques enabling users to show and hide attributes between views and leverage AI to manipulate, reformat, and generate new attributes. For composition and layout, we provided solutions to compose multiple overviews and detail views and transform between various overview and overview-detail layouts. A user study on our techniques implemented in two design probes revealed that participants produced diverse customizations and unique usage patterns, highlighting the need and broad applicability for malleable overview-detail interfaces.
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This content will become publicly available on September 27, 2026
Meridian: A Design Framework for Malleable Overview-Detail Interfaces
Overview-detail interfaces (ODIs), which present an overview of multiple items alongside a detailed view of a selected item, are ubiquitously implemented in software interfaces. However, the current design and development pipeline lacks the infrastructure to easily support end-user customization, limiting its ability to support diverse information needs. This research envisions a development cycle for building malleable interfaces—one where designers, developers, and end-users alike can create, modify, and use the interfaceequally. To establish a foundation for this infrastructure, we in-troduce Meridian, a design framework for guiding and facilitatingthe creation of malleable ODIs. The framework consists of a high-level declarative specification language for ODIs as well as its tools, including a UI development package and a no-code web builder to facilitate the development and design of malleable ODIs. We demonstrate how Meridian supports designers, developers, and end-users alike in designing, implementing, and interacting with ODIs in novel ways using their respective familiar tools and platforms. Finally, we discuss technical tradeoffs, potential solutions, and opportunities for enabling interface malleability by default.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2432644
- PAR ID:
- 10656138
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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