Content-Centric Prototyping of Generative AI Applications: Emerging Approaches and Challenges in Collaborative Software Teams

Generative AI models are increasingly powering software applications, offering the capability to produce expressive content across varied contexts. However, unlike previous iterations of human-AI design, the emerging design process for generative capabilities primarily hinges on prompt engineering strategies. Given this fundamental shift in approach, our work aims to understand how collaborative software teams set up and apply design guidelines and values, iteratively prototype prompts, and evaluate prompts to achieve desired outcomes. We conducted design studies with 39 industry professionals, including designers, software engineers, and product managers. Our findings reveal a content-centric prototyping approach in which teams begin with the content they want to generate, then identify specific attributes, constraints, and values, and explore methods to give users the ability to influence and interact with those attributes. Based on associated challenges, such as the lack of model interpretability and overfitting the design to examples, we outline considerations for generative AI prototyping.