Redefining design templates in the age of AI

Company

Microsoft

Date:

2024

Role

Product Designer

Overview

Microsoft Designer's Design From Scratch feature started with the goal of making design creation faster, easier, and more intuitive for everyone. However, with the limited traditional design templates and prompt templates available, many users were left with poor results and a negative first impression of Designer. We needed a way to both improve our design template quality and increase user retention.



The solution

Using a mixture of prompt engineering and art direction, I crafted new generative AI models and prompt engineering, I created over 150 prompt templates with style and intent combinations ranging from our most popular categories. These prompt templates were then transformed into over 7,500 design template library by our ML team using generative AI models.




Impact

The refined prompt templates launched as part of Microsoft Designer’s August 2024 General Audience (GA) release.


  • Created over 150 style and intent pairings which led to a library of over 100,000 prompt templates.

  • 30% increase in user retention.

  • Established the initial creative direction, paving the way for a dedicated Content team to continuously refine and expand on the work.

  • Featured in a Microsoft Design article to talk about my experience working on generative AI features and the future of AI in design.