AI Caption Writer
Overview
Writing a post caption is a key step when it comes to scheduling and publishing on social media. However, it often requires effort to come up with something unique and compelling. As Later ventured into bringing artificial intelligence onto the platform for the first time, we believed that we could use AI to help users generate data-driven, platform-optimized captions.
In collaboration with Later’s CTO and Head of Design, we began setting out the foundation for what would soon be our flagship AI feature.
Impact
- The caption writer now accounts for 35% of all new paid plan trial starts
- 20% of all monthly-active users now generate captions on Later
- 53% of all users who start scheduling a post open up the caption writer, and 43% of these users insert at once generated caption
Contributions
- Assisted the CTO in developing an early functioning prototype for closed beta testing
- Participated in collaborative working sessions with a selected group of internal stakeholders
- Designed the end-to-end workflow and planning the sequence of development phases
- Contributed to discussions on cost structure and financial models for the feature
- Built prototypes for user research
- Collaborated with the product owner on measuring success
- Collaborated with the product designer and developers on implementation details and minor fixes
Process
We started the project by auditing the existing onboarding process and possible pathways users could possibly take to complete it. This allowed us to visualize points of drop-offs and blockers for new users. This also gave us performative benchmarks to compare our new onboarding improvements with.
In addition to the audit, I also developed a common framework for the team to use as a guiding principle to base the new onboarding experience. In short, the 3-Dimensional Onboarding Framework describes how an evolving product like Later, which is much more feature-rich now than before, would benefit from opening up its rigid onboarding process in order to serve new demographics that use the platform for different reasons.
Features
Intuitive Feature Placement
Because captions are often only created during the process of creating a post, we decided to place it within the post builder modal and inside the caption field, bringing visibility to when users need it the most.
Side Modal Fly-Out
We used a side modal fly-out to give users the ability to work on their captions at the same time they are generating them. Here, all the user needs to do to describe the type of post they are making and assign an optional tone to characterize the caption generated. As a premium feature, we also offer tiered access based off how many generations you need a month in the form of credits as seen on the bottom of the fly-out.
Generated Captions
The caption writer generates 3 different captions for the user to choose from with every generation. Users can then directly insert the caption onto their post draft, ask the caption writer to rephrase the selected caption or change the tone.
Impact
- The caption writer now accounts for 35% of all new paid plan trial starts
- 20% of all monthly-active users now generate captions on Later
- 53% of all users who start scheduling a post open up the caption writer, and 43% of these users insert at once generated caption
