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With the advancement of Large-Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVMs), agents have shown significant capabilities in various tasks, such as data analysis, gaming, or code generation. Recently, there has been a surge in research on web agents, capable of performing tasks within the web environment. However, the web poses unforeseeable scenarios, challenging the generalizability of these agents. This study investigates the disparities between human and web agents' performance in web tasks (e.g., information search) by concentrating on planning, action, and reflection aspects during task execution. We conducted a web task study with a think-aloud protocol, revealing distinct cognitive actions and operations on websites employed by humans. Comparative examination of existing agent structures and human behavior with thought processes highlighted differences in knowledge updating and ambiguity handling when performing the task. Humans demonstrated a propensity for exploring and modifying plans based on additional information and investigating reasons for failure. These findings offer insights into designing planning, reflection, and information discovery modules for web agents and designing the capturing method for implicit human knowledge in a web task.

Despite the growing demand for professional graphic design knowledge, the tacit nature of design inhibits knowledge sharing. However, there is a limited understanding on the characteristics and instances of tacit knowledge in graphic design. In this work, we build a comprehensive set of tacit knowledge characteristics through a literature review. Through interviews with 10 professional graphic designers, we collected 123 tacit knowledge instances and labeled their characteristics. By qualitatively coding the instances, we identified the prominent elements, actions, and purposes of tacit knowledge. To identify which instances have been addressed the least, we conducted a systematic literature review of prior system support to graphic design. By understanding the reasons for the lack of support on these instances based on their characteristics, we propose design guidelines for capturing and applying tacit knowledge in design tools. This work takes a step towards understanding tacit knowledge, and how this knowledge can be communicated.

Graphic designers often get inspiration through the recombination of references. Our formative study (N=6) reveals that graphic designers focus on conceptual keywords during this process, and want support for discovering the keywords, expanding them, and exploring diverse recombination options of them, while still having room for designers' creativity. We propose CreativeConnect, a system with generative AI pipelines that helps users discover useful elements from the reference image using keywords, recommends relevant keywords, generates diverse recombination options with user-selected keywords, and shows recombinations as sketches with text descriptions. Our user study (N=16) showed that CreativeConnect helped users discover keywords from the reference and generate multiple ideas based on them, ultimately helping users produce more design ideas with higher self-reported creativity compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was shown effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.

Designers rely on visual search to explore and develop ideas in early design stages. However, designers can struggle to identify suitable text queries to initiate a search or to discover images for similarity-based search that can adequately express their intent. We propose GenQuery, a novel system that integrates generative models into the visual search process. GenQuery can automatically elaborate on users' queries and surface concrete search directions when users only have abstract ideas. To support precise expression of search intents, the system enables users to generatively modify images and use these in similarity-based search. In a comparative user study (N=16), designers felt that they could more accurately express their intents and find more satisfactory outcomes with GenQuery compared to a tool without generative features. Furthermore, the unpredictability of generations allowed participants to uncover more diverse outcomes. By supporting both convergence and divergence, GenQuery led to a more creative experience., Comment: 18 pages and 12 figures