Inkwell
Product Design, Strategy & Vision for AI MLP*
Inkwell was an AI-generated press release product venture that was formed back in 2022 by co-founders Ed Molyneux (Co-founder & former CEO of FreeAgent) and Sarah Lee (Vice Chair of CIPR Scotland & Founder of Hot Tin Roof). Inkwell’s focus was to help users generate a stronger newsworthy press release with the support of AI. By asking users a series of questions regarding their topic, industry and whether it would generate traction for newsworthiness.
Based on the users input of information, Inkwell would display a newsworthiness score to help users improve the strength of their story. In accordance to the newsworthy cycles within that specific industry. Users could further improve and craft their press release based on this score, but Inkwell would also provide prompts or suggestions on what users could change to make their press release stronger.
Venture Context
Ed and Sarah approached Dominic in March 2023 to get his support on the product design execution of Inkwell. He presented the following designs to Ed and Sarah after their first call, to further their dialogue. They were both extremely impressed with the efficiency, clarity and vision he produced of Inkwell.
The two existing co-founders made a proposal to Dominic to join as the third co-founder of the Inkwell venture in March 2023. He joined and went on to lead the venture for a few months, with the arrival of a fourth co-founder - Darcie Tanner.
During his brief tenure at Inkwell, all 3 co-founders mutually agreed that Dominic should be the frontrunner to lead the venture as the CEO. He did for a month but decided to step down to refocus on his client projects.
Inkwell was launched in 2024 by Ed, Sarah and Darcie. But did not pick up enough user and market traction or funding to keep the venture afloat.
*MLP - Minimum Likeable Product, the founders worked to the concept of making a minimum likeable product from a users perspective. Instead of looking at what could they achieve as a minimum from a feature-set perspective.
Establishing the Direction
Concept One
Dominic’s first attempt of producing a refreshed vision of the Inkwell product. As when Ed and Sarah had been mostly working on the backend and PR prompting in cohesion with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 for AI support. The design was an after thought and merely looked like a wireframe. Until Dominic entered the discussion.
Here focused on
Introducing a dashboard for users to review all of their press release options
Filtering their overview of press releases by the template
Templates were formed based on the most common announcements businesses would make
Included workflow sorting such as Drafts, Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Release and Released statuses
Providing standard tools to support with the view and interaction on the press release
Included a highlight option, with the idea of making the Press Release a collaborative space for Inkwell to support teams with feedback and iterations. Similar to Google Docs
Developing the Vision
Concept Two
Once Dominic has impressed Ed and Sarah with an improved vision of the design direction but also the feature capabilities to enhance the user value of the Inkwell product. He begun elaborating further into detail was these features could look like to make the user experience is even better than his first concept.
Here Dominic focuses on the capability to:
Measure the score of each answer to each question, plus including a prompt to help the user improve
Providing more settings such as Accessibility to enhance the type for visually impaired users
Included a two tab view for ‘Your Press Release’ and ‘Relevancy Feedback’
Enabled the user to view the two tab options side by side, so users could review feedback
Measuring the word count of the press release for impact but also to not make it too dense
Inkwell Go!
Mobile Concept
As the team begun to ponder on ways to improve the Desktop experience. Dominic begun to think ahead and consider how Inkwell could provide users with value on the go. Anything users do on a Desktop device, they expect the same experience on a Mobile device for ease, dynamic and flexible working methods.
Dominic begun to produce a Mobile experience concept that would:
Provide users with the same ability as the Desktop device
An intuitive Mobile experience which felt consistent from an interaction perspective as Desktop
Enabling continued collaboration amongst teams who would be trying to develop their press release
Key Lessons
Measuring newsworthiness is a challenging element to measure, without a specific focus on nuisance. As new cycles evolve and switch focuses at a more rapid pace in the social media era.
Encouraging non-PR aware users to answer up to 19 questions was deemed overwhelming. However, PR professionals understood the need for precision for focus.
Establishing confidence in an AI product back in 2023, was more difficult. As PR professionals would see this tool as a possible option which could replace their services and work - if their clients caught onto it’s ability to potentially replace them.
Tough to build and establish trust with a new user basis, especially those who are not experienced in PR. As to what to parameters and prompts the AI tool was designed to provide a score depiction.
Convincing users their newsworthiness score was accurate, based on the information users entered - was seen as subjective. Not every user agreed with the value score shown.