ClearFairy: Capturing Creative Workflows through Decision Structuring, In-Situ Questioning, and Rationale Inference

Abstract: Capturing professionals' decision-making in creative workflows is essential for reflection, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, yet existing methods often leave rationales incomplete and implicit decisions hidden. To address this, we present CLEAR framework that structures reasoning into cognitive decision steps-linked units of actions, artifacts, and self-explanations that make decisions traceable. Building on this framework, we introduce ClearFairy, a think-aloud AI assistant for UI design that detects weak explanations, asks lightweight clarifying questions, and infers missing rationales to ease the knowledge-sharing burden. In a study with twelve creative professionals, 85% of ClearFairy's inferred rationales were accepted, increasing strong explanations from 14% to over 83% of decision steps without adding cognitive demand. The captured steps also enhanced generative AI agents in Figma, yielding next-action predictions better aligned with professionals and producing more coherent design outcomes. For future research on human knowledge-grounded creative AI agents, we release a dataset of captured 417 decision steps.