Expanding the Generative AI Design Space through Structured Prompting and Multimodal Interfaces
This work addresses usability challenges for novice designers in generative AI, offering an incremental improvement through structured interfaces.
The paper tackled the problem of novice users, such as small business owners, struggling with text-based prompting in generative AI for creative tasks like advertising, and presented ACAI, a multimodal tool with structured input panels that improved alignment and co-creative control in user workflows.
Text-based prompting remains the predominant interaction paradigm in generative AI, yet it often introduces friction for novice users such as small business owners (SBOs), who struggle to articulate creative goals in domain-specific contexts like advertising. Through a formative study with six SBOs in the United Kingdom, we identify three key challenges: difficulties in expressing brand intuition through prompts, limited opportunities for fine-grained adjustment and refinement during and after content generation, and the frequent production of generic content that lacks brand specificity. In response, we present ACAI (AI Co-Creation for Advertising and Inspiration), a multimodal generative AI tool designed to support novice designers by moving beyond traditional prompt interfaces. ACAI features a structured input system composed of three panels: Branding, Audience and Goals, and the Inspiration Board. These inputs allow users to convey brand-relevant context and visual preferences. This work contributes to HCI research on generative systems by showing how structured interfaces can foreground user-defined context, improve alignment, and enhance co-creative control in novice creative workflows.