AI image generators for web designers

Objective: Develop a new approach for integrating AI-powered image generators into the workflow of web designers to streamline and enhance efficiency.

Research

• Form an understanding of how web designers use DreamStudio (https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/generate)

• Diary questionnaire with web designers, who were given the task to use DreamStudio for four days as inspiration to produce images they could use for their websites or for inspiration.

• Followed up with semi-structured interviews to get more details on the interactions and the impressions of the tool and potential use cases

  
  

Analysis

• Affinity diagramming which resulted in 10 categories. This led to focusing on five themes to further explore: Onboarding/guidelines, Prompt Language, Potential use cases, Unrealistic Humans and quality of images, and Post-processing.

• Takeaway from analysis; AI image generating technology was not sufficient in generating realistic images from a text prompt. Therefore, the web designers did not find the images useful. However, the respondents also found the tools confusing and did not know how to specify their prompts and settings.

  
  

Opportunity areas

• Asked 'How might we?' questions to spark inspiration of areas that could be enhanced. Led to: “How might we efficiently support web designers generating customized unique images originating from existing images?”. We chose to focus on using existing images, as the original generated images was not realistic enough. However, real images that were manipulated via. AI, were more realistic.

• This led us to focusing on improving two features of the AI image generator: the onboarding process and easier and the manipulation of 'real' photos via. AI.

  
  

Prototyping

• Designed a few different interactive low-fidelity wireframes in Figma and tested via. 'think-out-loud'-method before landing on final design and functionality

• Resulted in an interactive high-fidelity prototype. The concept was a WordPress Plugin, that let web designers generate alternate versions of used photos and icons with a few clicks.