Cells, Generators, and Lenses: Design Framework for Object-Oriented Interaction with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the backbone of numerous writing interfaces with the goal of supporting end-users across diverse writing tasks. While LLMs reduce the effort of manual writing, end-users may need to experiment and iterate with various generation configurations (e.g., inputs and model parameters) until results meet their goals. However, these interfaces are not designed for experimentation and iteration, and can restrict how end-users track, compare, and combine configurations. In this work, we present “cells, generators, and lenses”, a framework to designing interfaces that support interactive objects that embody configuration components (i.e., input, model, output). Interface designers can apply our framework to produce interfaces that enable end-users to create variations of these objects, combine and recombine them into new configurations, and compare them in parallel to efficiently iterate and experiment with LLMs. To showcase how our framework generalizes to diverse writing tasks, we redesigned three different interfaces—story writing, copywriting, and email composing—and, to demonstrate its effectiveness in supporting end-users, we conducted a comparative study (N=18) where participants used our interactive objects to generate and experiment more. Finally, we investigate the usability of the framework through a workshop with designers (N=3) where we observed that our framework served as both bootstrapping and inspiration in the design process.