Details
Iris
Iris is an AI-powered content creation tool designed to help small business owners plan, design, post, and track analytics for social media content with ease. Many small business owners know that content is essential for growth, but creating it consistently requires time, design skills, and strategic planning they often don’t have. Juggling day-to-day responsibilities leaves little space for creative work, which leads to overwhelm and inconsistency online. We set out to solve this by making content creation simpler, more accessible, and more supportive.
Client
SAS
Year
Spring 2025 (8 weeks)
Role
UI/UX Design & Scenario Video
Team
3 UI/UX Designers
The challenge
Iris was created in partnership with SAS, a global leader in data and AI focused on helping people make confident, informed decisions. Their mission to make powerful analytics easier to use shaped the challenge for this 8‑week project:
Exploring opportunities within the social media industry
We did multiple brainstorming sessions on spaces that we could help using generative AI within social media. After speaking with multiple stakeholders, we saw an opportunity specifically within content creation for business owners.
Gathering insights from small business owners
Because of the project’s accelerated timeline, we couldn’t conduct full formal interviews. However, we still wanted direct user insight, so we held quick, conversational mini-interviews with small business owners and content creators to ground our assumptions in real experiences. These conversations revealed consistent pain points:
We learned that consistent content ideas that create a social media presence that results in impact in sales were difficult. People felt pressure to “be consistent,” but the workflow itself was both exhausting and time-consuming. Existing platforms handled only pieces of the journey, forcing creators to stitch together planning tools, design tools, schedulers, and analytics on their own.
What did other platforms provide
We explored leading social media and content creation platforms to understand how others approached this problem. While many tools offered powerful features, most optimized for automation, analytics, or templates rather than the lived experience of a small business owner. This analysis revealed a gap: very few platforms were designed around creative flow, emotional confidence, and a unified end‑to‑end journey.
Clarifying what busy business owners need
At first, the problem looked like a tooling issue: too many apps and not enough integration. But stepping back, the deeper challenge was human.
Small business owners were not struggling because they lacked features. They were struggling because the current ecosystem breaks creative momentum and makes content creation feel intimidating instead of encouraging. Some wanted step‑by‑step guidance. Others wanted full creative control with light support. The opportunity was to design a flexible, unified experience that meets creators where they are and helps them move forward with confidence.
How might we design one creative flow that manages the entire content journey without cognitive overload?
How might we support owners with different levels of design agency?
How might we provide inspiration that makes consistency feel achievable rather than exhausting?
Defining our user
To make sure we were solving for our user, we developed a persona. Hazel is a creative and organized assistant manager who loves capturing content on the floor but struggles to keep up with the demands of social media. Between helping customers, managing inventory, and mentoring her team, she rarely has time to create posts that look polished or align with her shop’s brand.
Opportunities for our application support users
The task flow was designed to guide her through each step of content creation clearly and easily. AI helps where it makes sense by suggesting, reminding, and supporting her while she stays in control.
Exploring multiple early solutions
Early sketches and wireframes explored multiple directions, from heavy automation to rigid templates. These concepts helped us test where AI should assist and where creative control should remain with the user.
We explored how far generative AI should go within the platform
We held team discussions about the role of generative AI. Some concepts gave AI full control over content generation, while others questioned whether AI should write anything at all. These tensions led to a pivot: AI should support efficiency and inspiration, but the user should always remain the creative author.
This insight shaped the system to balance automation with agency, allowing different users to choose how much control they want by choosing manual mode for more control.
Throughout the process users have the ability to hit the regenerate button that uses AI to enhance/make changes to your content based on you brand guidelines, tone, and trend analysis.
Iris is an AI‑powered creative companion that supports small business owners through the full content journey, from idea to published post and analytics.
Advanced Editing For Full Creative Control
For users who want a hands‑on approach, Iris offers advanced editing tools for layout, photo editing, and caption writing, enabling full ownership of the creative process.
Informational Dashboard
Users can quickly access multiple things such as continuing a recent project, understanding performance analytics, and personalized inspiration for education on content creation ideas.
Mobile Capture And Enhancement
The mobile app makes it easy to capture photos on the go, enhance them with AI, and save them directly to a built‑in drive so they are ready for content creation without cluttering the phone’s gallery.
This project showed how AI can improve consistency and confidence without replacing human creativity. People responded positively to having one supportive space that respected their agency and made content creation feel achievable.
If I continued Iris, I would conduct deeper usability testing, expand mobile workflows, and explore transparent, ethical AI controls so creators always understand and trust how the system supports them.
Designing Iris reinforced my belief that good UX is not about adding more power. It is about removing friction with empathy and designing systems that help people keep going.