Project overview
yokey is an AI-powered creative platform that brings tools for image, video, audio, voice, and 3D generation into one place. It was designed to turn a creative process that is often scattered across dozens of tools and models into a single, seamless, intuitive experience. Beyond the creative tools themselves, yokey enables users to manage projects, collaborate with teams, and stay in control of budgets and production workflows - allowing them to focus on creating rather than dealing with the complexity behind the technology.
Designing a Better Way to Prompt
Yokey is a creative AI platform for generating images, video, audio, and other media. One of the main challenges was making advanced AI tools feel accessible without forcing users to become experts in prompt engineering.
The problem
Most creative AI tools expect users to describe exactly what they want in a single prompt. But users often know the idea they want to create without knowing how to translate it into the level of detail AI models need - such as composition, lighting, camera angle, mood, or movement. As a result, the quality of the output often depends less on the user's creative idea and more on their ability to write a good prompt.
The Existing Pattern
A common solution across AI platforms is an Enhance Prompt feature. The system takes the user's prompt and automatically adds more detail to it. While this can improve the prompt technically, it also creates a new problem: the AI has to guess the user's intent. If the user did not specify whether the scene should be a close-up or a wide shot, for example, the system simply makes that decision for them.
The Opportunity
Instead of asking AI to guess what the user meant, I asked a different question:
What if Yokey could simply ask?
This became the foundation for Plan Mode.
The Solution
With Plan Mode, users do not need to start with a fully formed prompt. They can describe their idea in simple, natural language, and Yokey follows up with a short series of relevant questions. The questions help clarify important creative decisions such as the scene, action, mood, lighting, framing, and visual style. Behind the scenes, Yokey turns those answers into a detailed, structured prompt before sending it to the generation model.
The flow shifts from:
AI fills in the gapsGenerationTo:
Guided questionsClear creative intentGenerationWhy This Works
Plan Mode reduces the need for prompt-engineering knowledge while keeping creative decisions in the user's hands. Instead of silently inventing missing details, the system creates a lightweight conversation that helps users think through their idea. The goal was not simply to generate a longer prompt, but to help users express their intent more accurately.
Designing for Costly Mistakes
Another challenge appeared at the moment of generation. Every generation has a real cost, and once the request is sent to the AI provider, that cost cannot usually be recovered. A common mistake is clicking Generate and immediately realizing that one setting was left unchanged - for example, the wrong aspect ratio, model, or output settings.
A Three-Second Safety Window
To reduce these accidental costs, I introduced a short three-second delay before the generation request is sent to the provider. During this window, users can cancel the action immediately. It is a small interaction, but it gives users a chance to catch mistakes before they become irreversible. This decision reflects the same principle behind Plan Mode: AI products should not only help users create faster - they should also give them more control over the process.