AIzel
Research
Interviews
We interviewed three small business owners (real estate, martial arts, and social media) to understand their online marketing challenges:
Managing social media drains time, energy, and money, leading owners to seek external tools.
Many feel overwhelmed by marketing and hesitate to invest without clear results.
They want affordable, easy-to-use tools to create effective ad campaigns.
Affinity Map
This affinity map showed that small business owners struggle with cost, strategy, and confidence. Their interest in AI assistance reveals an opportunity for a tool that provides guidance while staying transparent and user-friendly.
Persona
Cameron is a 45-year-old café owner in Raleigh, NC, working to grow her personal brand through social media. While she’s motivated and hardworking, she struggles with the complexity, cost, and risk of digital marketing, and needs simple, transparent tools that help her reach new customers with confidence.
Attract new customers to grow her business
Stronger social media structure/strategy
Her investments need to be cost effective and have an impactful ROI
Finds it difficult to target a specific group of people
Getting spams from other businesses she cannot afford
Competing with big coffee brands that are established on social media
User Flow
This flow shows how small business owners use AIZEL to create, optimize, and publish posts. It highlights AI features, key decisions, and how performance data fuels smarter future recommendations.
Ideation
From Low-Fi to Hi-Fi
Solution
Demo Video
Key Features
Post Strategy Assistant
In addition to standard post creation, AIZEL recommends content based on upcoming events, trending topics, high-performing past posts, and opportunities for collaborations or promotional boosts—helping users stay timely, relevant, and strategic.
Caption Insight Tool
AIZEL enhances captions with smart suggestions to improve clarity, tone, and engagement. Users can edit or let AIZEL generate a new version.
A strength bar rates effectiveness, with insights explaining how to improve and why.
Campaign Cost Overview
AIZEL’s Boost button shows total cost, daily spend, and duration—offering full transparency so small business owners can budget confidently and avoid unexpected costs.
Reflection
Limitations
This 2-month project could benefit from more time to fully develop the AI features. There’s room to better support users in understanding data and creating impactful posts. User testing and access to real data and social media algorithms would enhance AIZEL’s efficiency and alignment with machine behavior.
For The Future
Greater customization for data visualization and tracking
Extend the AI use with photo and video editing and AI assistant personalization
Run user and accessibility testings
