Bespoke: Interactively Synthesizing Custom GUIs from Command-Line Applications By Demonstration

Despite their usability problems, command-line applications are frequently used by programmers, researchers, system administrators, and data scientists. To give these power users the well-known benefit of GUIs, we created Bespoke, an interactive system that synthesizes form-based GUIs by observing user demonstrations of command-line apps. To our knowledge, Bespoke is the first attempt to use demonstration-based techniques to synthesize GUIs from command-line invocations. To assess the versatility and limitations of Bespoke, we ran an exploratory study where we let participants use it to create a custom GUI in a domain that personally motivated them. They ended up creating a diverse set of GUIs for domains such as cloud computing management, prototyping machine learning, transcribing lecture videos, integrated circuit design, remote code deployment, and gaming server management. Participants reported that the main benefit of these bespoke GUIs is that they exposed only the most relevant subset of options required for their needs. In contrast, any official GUI made by the app's manufacturer would usually include far more panes, menus, and settings since they must accommodate a wider range of possible use cases.