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Generative AI has enabled novice designers to quickly create professional-looking visual representations for product concepts. However, novices have limited domain knowledge that could constrain their ability to write prompts that effectively explore a product design space. To understand how experts explore and communicate about design spaces, we conducted a formative study with 12 experienced product designers and found that experts — and their less-versed clients — often use visual references to guide co-design discussions rather than written descriptions. These insights inspired DesignWeaver, an interface that helps novices generate prompts for a text-to-image model by surfacing key product design dimensions from generated images into a palette for quick selection. In a study with 52 novices, DesignWeaver enabled participants to craft longer prompts with more domain-specific vocabularies, resulting in more diverse, innovative product designs. However, the nuanced prompts heightened participants’ expectations beyond what current text-to-image models could deliver. We discuss implications for AI-based product design support tools. 

While creativity is often romanticized as a serendipitous ’aha’ moment of insight, in reality, it is an iterative process that often involves searching for information on the Web. In this paper, we investigate the role of web search throughout the creative process. We conducted a longitudinal study involving 15 professionals engaged in creative work, such as scientific research, startup product design, and policy development, observing them throughout their one to six-month-long projects. We developed Web ChronoLogger, a browser extension that logs Web Search and Project document activity over the course of the project in an intuitive, transparent, and privacy-preserving manner. Additionally, we collect qualitative insights from participants reflecting on their logs through weekly surveys and a post-study interview. We find quantitative patterns in how participants search the web and work with information in working documents throughout their creative projects. Web search was used even when generating ideas and defining goals, stages often assumed to involve just mental processes. Further, patterns in the content, structure, and edit history of how participants work with information found on the web can encode signals about the user’s context, such as patterns and gaps in their knowledge, project goals and progress, and work style. This study’s longitudinal perspective provides a foundation for building the future of web search tools in ways that support the entire creative workflow.