Expanding the Generative AI Design Space through Structured Prompting and Multimodal Interfaces

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.

ACAI for SBOs: AI Co-creation for Advertising and Inspiration for Small Business Owners

Small business owners (SBOs) often lack the resources and design experience needed to produce high-quality advertisements. To address this, we developed ACAI (AI Co-Creation for Advertising and Inspiration), an GenAI-powered multimodal advertisement creation tool, and conducted a user study with 16 SBOs in London to explore their perceptions of and interactions with ACAI in advertisement creation. Our findings reveal that structured inputs enhance user agency and control while improving AI outputs by facilitating better brand alignment, enhancing AI transparency, and offering scaffolding that assists novice designers, such as SBOs, in formulating prompts. We also found that ACAI's multimodal interface bridges the design skill gap for SBOs with a clear advertisement vision, but who lack the design jargon necessary for effective prompting. Building on our findings, we propose three capabilities: contextual intelligence, adaptive interactions, and data management, with corresponding design recommendations to advance the co-creative attributes of AI-mediated design tools.