  Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem
solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with
many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples,
with little clear theoretical guidance. To understand how example interaction
design choices affect whether/how people benefit from examples, we conducted an
experiment where 182 participants worked on a controlled analog to an
exploratory creativity task, with access to examples of varying diversity and
presentation interfaces. Task performance was worse when examples were
presented in a list, compared to contextualized in the exploration space or
shown in a dropdown list. Example lists were associated with more fixation,
whereas contextualized examples were associated with using examples to
formulate a model of the problem space to guide exploration. We discuss
implications of these results for a theoretical framework that maps design
choices to fundamental psychological mechanisms of creative inspiration from
examples.
