Influencer: Empowering Everyday Users in Creating Promotional Posts via AI-infused Exploration and Customization

Abstract: Creating promotional posts on social platforms enables everyday users to disseminate their creative outcomes, engage in community exchanges, or generate additional income from micro-businesses. However, creating eye-catching posts combining both original, appealing images and articulate, effective captions can be rather challenging and time-consuming for everyday users who are mostly design novices. We propose Influen, an interactive tool to assist novice creators in crafting high-quality promotional post designs, achieving quick design ideation and unencumbered content creation through AI. Within Influencer, we contribute a multi-dimensional recommendation framework that allows users to intuitively generate new ideas through example-based image and caption recommendation. Further, Influencer implements a holistic promotional post design system that supports context-aware image and caption exploration considering brand messages and user-specified design constraints, flexible fusion of various images and captions, and a mind-map-like layout for thinking tracking and post-recording. We evaluated Influencer with 12 design enthusiasts through an in-lab user study by comparing it to a baseline combining Google Search + Figma. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that \sysname{} is effective in assisting design novices to generate ideas as well as creative and diverse promotional posts with user-friendly interaction.