User Experience
Branding
App Design
AI Utilization
APP CONTEXT
Iris is a mobile and desktop app that streamlines content creation and management. It creates, schedules, and posts across multiple platforms while keeping everything organized for easy collaboration. Users can capture content on mobile, view it instantly on desktop, and stay on track with synced calendars and reminders. Iris also tracks engagement and provides personalized analytics to help social media managers and small business owners maintain a cohesive feed with ease.
Iris
Social Media Management
Objective
Develop a cross-platform content creation and management tool that empowers small businesses and social media managers to efficiently create, organize, and publish content using generative AI and UX/UI design.
Goal
Busy professionals struggle to manage multiple social platforms with limited time and resources.
Our goal was to design an AI-powered application that streamlines content creation and scheduling while preserving creative control, automating routine tasks, supporting collaboration, and providing personalized analytics to help users maintain a cohesive, high-quality social media presence with ease.
Research
Project Brief
Partnering with SAS, a global leader in analytics software, we were tasked with designing an original B2B application that integrates generative AI to address real business and user needs.
Our challenge was to leverage AI in an impactful way—creating a solution that supports data-driven decision-making and improves workflow efficiency.
Problem Identification
We began by exploring a wide range of challenges in the social media space, identifying issues from content creation to workflow inefficiencies.
After evaluating how AI could address these problems, we narrowed our focus to the most valuable B2B opportunity; streamlining social media management for businesses.
User Interviews
We interviewed individuals who have had experiences managing or assisting with social media for their businesses to validate our direction.
Market Research
Current platforms offer fragmented solutions, but users often need separate tools for design, editing, scheduling, and analytics; leading to wasted time and inconsistent workflows.
Key Insights
After completing our problem identification and user research, we felt confident in our direction. The following key insights emerged as essential to shaping our design decisions.
Creativity
Users struggle to craft engaging captions and visually cohesive posts, revealing a need for AI-assisted creative support and editing tools.
Efficiency
Managing multiple campaigns and posting schedules is time-consuming, emphasizing the importance of automation and streamlined workflows.
Optimization
Users need help adapting content for different social media formats and size ratios to maintain quality and consistency across platforms.
User Persona
With our key insights defined, we developed a user persona to represent our target audience.
This persona captures the needs, goals, and frustrations of typical users, helping guide our design decisions and ensure that our application addresses our user's pain points.
Ideate
Brainstorming
To kick off our design process, we utilized FigJam to rapidly brainstorm ideas, layouts, potential user flows, and core features; allowing us to explore many different concepts and opportunities.
Applying AI
At this point in the process, we have identified what features we would like our app to have. So, we then took a step back into research to identify what AI systems we would like to utilize and what role they play within our application.
Deep Learning Image Detection is used for automatically identifying subjects within images and other visual content. This helps us detect trends and viral content on social media by recognizing key visuals in user-generated media, which then supports more accurate suggestions.
Generative Adversarial Networks assist in creating high-quality, detailed images and allow for precise editing of existing content.
Time Series Forecasting is applied to predict trends, optimize content strategies, schedule posts, and support marketing and engagement planning.
User Flows
We utilized user flows to map out the process and story for our persona, Hazel, visualizing how she would navigate the app from start to finish.
Throughout this stage, we went through multiple iterations, experimenting with different pathways and refining the flow to best support her goals and behaviors.
This process helped us pinpoint key interactions, decision points, and pain points within our concept.
User Story
We developed a user story to illustrate how our persona, Hazel, would interact with the app in a real-world scenario.
This process helped us identify and prioritize the key pages and features to design and include in our prototype.
Design
Low/Mid-Fi Wireframes
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Hi-Fi Wireframes
Mobile Application
The mobile version of our application is where users will take photos that will import directly into Iris's photo library.
Home Page
Here is the user's landing page of customizable widgets displaying projects, AI-generated inspiration and suggestions, and analytic engagement summaries.
Create New Project Page
This page is where users create their next post(s) and can utilize AI to help with idea generation and the creative process.
Preview Page
This page is where AI assists users in caption generation, setting the mood/tone of your post, and other automatic edits.
This is where users can also view mock-ups of their post on each platform before it is uploaded.
Scheduling Page
This is where users can schedule their posts. Here, they can manually schedule when they want their posts uploaded, or they can utilize AI's suggested post times based on engagement analytics and user patterns.
Manual Edit Mode
If users would like to manually edit their photos, there is a mode for that as well. After the project creation page, they can select "create manually" rather than auto-create, and it brings them to this page. Here, there are more detailed editing features that the user can control.
