Ooha, an AI Canvas for your limitless imagination

Background & Problem

An instructor, who teaches experimental media at UCSC, articulated the problem during a semi-structured interview: "My students are creating incredible work with AI, but they're fighting against the interface every step of the way. They need to see multiple possibilities simultaneously, compare variations, and branch their explorations in different directions. The chat paradigm forces them into a creative straightjacket."

This observation aligned with preliminary data we had gathered from surveying 87 creative professionals, where 76% reported that linear AI interfaces "significantly hindered" their creative process. The UCSC HCI program, with its emphasis on experimental and computational arts, provided an ideal testing ground for exploring alternative interaction paradigms.

Research Approach

Phase 1: Co-Design Workshops

We recruited 10 participants from the UCSC HCI community for a series of three co-design workshops held over two weeks in June 2024.Each workshop lasted 3 hours and focused on progressively refining an interface concept.

The first workshop began with participants mapping their current AI workflows using large sheets of paper and colored markers. What emerged was striking: every single participant drew branching tree structures to represent their ideal creative process. A participant elaborated "This is how my brain works," she explained, pointing to the interconnected web of ideas. "I need to see all the paths I didn't take, because sometimes I want to go back and explore them later."

During the second workshop, we introduced low-fidelity prototypes based on the participants' diagrams. Using a combination of paper prototypes and a basic digital mockup, participants could physically arrange and rearrange nodes representing AI interactions. The session revealed critical insights about spatial memory in creative work. Participants consistently placed related concepts in proximity to each other and developed personal organizational systems—some preferring vertical hierarchies, others favoring radial arrangements around central themes.

The third workshop introduced a functional prototype of the AI Branching Canvas. Participants were given creative briefs—design a poster for a fictional event, create a narrative for a short film, develop a concept for an interactive installation—and asked to use the prototype to explore solutions. We employed think-aloud protocol, recording both screen activity and verbal commentary as participants worked.

Phase 2: Evaluation Study

Following the co-design phase, we recruited 10 new participants from UCSC for a formal evaluation study conducted over one week in September 2024. This group included 3 self-identified Artists, 4 graduate students, and 3 advanced undergraduates, none of whom had participated in the co-design workshops.

Each participant attended two 90-minute sessions. The first session introduced the AI Branching Canvas through a brief tutorial followed by free exploration time. We used a minimal instruction approach, providing only essential information about basic interactions, to observe how intuitive users found the interface. The second session, conducted 2-3 days later, involved structured creative tasks designed to test specific aspects of the system.

Key Findings

Design Evolution

The feedback from UCSC participants directly influenced several critical design decisions. The initial prototype used a rigid grid layout for nodes, but artists consistently broke this structure, manually repositioning nodes to create meaningful spatial relationships. This led us to implement a fully free-form canvas where users have complete control over spatial organization.

The branching mechanism underwent significant refinement based on participant behavior. Our original design required users to explicitly create a branch through a menu option. However, we observed that 7 out of 10 participants instinctively tried to click or drag from existing nodes to create connections. This led to the implementation of the hover-based branch button, which appears contextually when users pause on a node.

Color and visual hierarchy proved more contentious than expected. Artists in our study had strong, often conflicting preferences about color usage. Some wanted rich, customizable color coding for different exploration threads, while others preferred minimal visual distinction to avoid influencing creative decisions. Our solution was a subtle, monochromatic design with optional color customization hidden in advanced settings.

Quantitative Results

We collected comprehensive metrics during the evaluation phase to quantify the impact of the spatial interface on creative workflows. Participants completed identical creative tasks using both the AI Branching Canvas and a traditional chat interface (randomized order to control for learning effects).

Qualitative Insights

Beyond the quantitative metrics, the qualitative feedback from UCSC participants revealed profound shifts in how they conceptualized AI-assisted creation. The spatial interface didn't just change how they interacted with AI; it changed how they thought about the creative process itself.

The visual nature of the interface particularly resonated with artists accustomed to working with spatial media. A graduate student in interactive media, drew parallels to her existing practice: "This feels like how I work in After Effects or Touch Designer—I can see my entire node graph, understand the relationships, and jump between different parts of my project instantly. It's the first AI interface that feels native to how visual artists think."

Challenges and Limitations

The study also revealed several challenges that warrant further investigation. Three participants initially felt overwhelmed by the freedom of the spatial interface, expressing nostalgia for the simplicity of linear chat. "Sometimes constraints are helpful," noted an undergraduate student. "With infinite space and infinite branches, I sometimes don't know where to start or when to stop."

Technical limitations also emerged during intensive use. When participants created more than 100 nodes in a single session, performance degradation became noticeable on older hardware. While this affected only 2 participants during our study, it highlights the need for optimization as users engage in increasingly complex explorations.

Future Directions

The success of the UCSC study has opened several avenues for future development. Participants consistently requested collaborative features, envisioning shared canvases where multiple artists could explore together in real-time. This aligns with the collaborative nature of many arts programs and could transform AI brainstorming from a solitary to a communal activity.

Integration with existing creative tools emerged as another priority. Seven participants explicitly requested the ability to export their branching explorations to tools like Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, or code repositories. The canvas could serve as a creative preprocessing layer that feeds into established production workflows.

Conclusion

The AI Branching Canvas study at UCSC demonstrated that reimagining interface paradigms can fundamentally transform how humans interact with AI systems. By aligning the interface with natural creative processes—branching exploration, spatial organization, and parallel comparison—we enabled artists to work with AI rather than against it.