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An Early Rico Retrospective: Three Years of Uses for a Mobile App Dataset

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Artificial Intelligence for Human Computer Interaction: A Modern Approach

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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Abstract

The Rico dataset, containing design data from more than 9.7 k Android apps spanning \(27\) categories, was released in 2017. It exposes visual, textual, structural, and interactive design properties of more than 72 k unique UI screens. Over the years since its release, the original paper has been cited nearly 100 times according to Google Scholar and the dataset has been used as the basis for numerous research projects. In this chapter, we describe the creation of Rico using a system that combined crowdsourcing and automation to scalably mine design and interaction data from Android apps at runtime. We then describe two projects that we conducted using the dataset: the training of an autoencoder to identify similarity between UI designs, and an exploration of the use of Google’s Material Design within the dataset using machine learned models. We conclude with an overview of other work that has used Rico to understand our mobile UI world and build data-driven models that assist users, designers, and developers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rico—a Spanish word meaning “rich”.

  2. 2.

    Material Design https://material.io/guidelines/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions and the crowd workers who helped build the Rico dataset. This work was supported in part by a Google Faculty Research Award.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. McKinsey, Chicago, IL, USA

    Biplab Deka

  2. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Bardia Doosti, Chad Franzen, Daniel Afergan, Yang Li & Tao Dong

  3. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Forrest Huang

  4. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Joshua Hibschman

  5. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Ranjitha Kumar

  6. Apple, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA

    Jeffrey Nichols

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Correspondence to Jeffrey Nichols .

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  1. Google Research (United States), Mountain View, CA, USA

    Yang Li

  2. Advanced Interactive Technologies Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Otmar Hilliges

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Deka, B. et al. (2021). An Early Rico Retrospective: Three Years of Uses for a Mobile App Dataset. In: Li, Y., Hilliges, O. (eds) Artificial Intelligence for Human Computer Interaction: A Modern Approach. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82681-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82681-9_8

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