DiverXplorer: Stock Image Exploration via Diversity Adjustment for Graphic Design
About
Graphic designers explore large stock image collections during open-ended or early-stage design tasks, yet common tools emphasize relevance and similarity, limiting designers' ability to overview the design space or discover visual patterns. We present an image exploration prototype that enables stepwise adjustment of diversity, allowing users to transition from diverse overviews to increasingly focused subsets during exploration. Our approach implements diversity control via determinantal point process (DPP)-based sampling and exposes diversity-similarity tradeoffs through interaction rather than static ranking. We report findings from a pilot study with professional graphic designers comparing our technique to baselines inspired by current tools in open-ended image selection tasks. Results suggest that stepwise diversity control supports early-stage sensemaking and comparison of visual patterns, while revealing important tradeoffs: diversity aids discovery and reduces backtracking, but becomes less desirable as exploration progresses. We aim to provide a novel perspective on how to implement transitions between diversity and similarity. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/DiverXplorer.