How To Use Chat GPT In Your Design Process?

Earlier we talked about how AI tools cannot replace designers and now that we have the solutions ready at our disposal, we need to focus more on framing the problem statement.

Today I want to discuss the different ways we as designers can use Chat GPT to speed up our design process. But before even jumping into this, I want to highlight that to get better results, you need to use better and more specific prompts. The better you articulate your intention, the more relevant result you will get from Chat GPT.

I found a template to frame the prompt.

1. Start with the end goal: Whether you're trying to save time or overcome the dreaded blank page, identifying the desired outcome is crucial. It helps you stay focused and ensures that you're working towards a specific objective.

2. Set the context: When working with Chat GPT, it's important to clarify its role. Avoid asking it to "pretend" as that can lead to unreliable results. Instead, provide clear instructions and set realistic expectations.

3. Provide specific information: Remember the adage "garbage in, garbage out"? Well, the same applies here. The more specific and relevant your inputs are, the better the output will be. Take the time to gather all the necessary information before feeding it to GPT.

4. Define the output: Do you need a one-liner, a paragraph, a list, or a table? Be clear about what you want to achieve and how the output should look. This will not only make it easier to process the results but also speed up the entire process.

Ways you can use this framework in Chat GPT for the design process-

User Research

Conducting user research can be a daunting task, especially when you're not sure where to start. Chat GPT can help you in a variety of ways throughout the user research process.

I asked Chat GPT the following prompt-

“You work for a company that provides online video tools for meetings. You've been asked to find the demographic data on parents in India who use your platform. Your goal is to identify key insights that will help you improve the user experience and increase adoption rates. Provide these insights in points.”

Based on this, Chat GPT provided me with the following answer and I can say it was 85% accurate.

Try it for the following tasks-

1. Idea generation

2. Questionnaire design

3. User persona

4. Competitive analysis

5. Guidance on User testing

User Experience

ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and solutions to improve the UX of digital products and services. e.g. I used the following prompt to find out UX flaws in the existing Airbnb website-

“You work as a designer for Airbnb company that is an online marketplace for short-term homestays and experiences. You've been asked to prepare a list of UX flaws that are existing on their website. Your goal is to identify the problems that new and existing users face when using the Airbnb website and how can we troubleshoot those problems. Provide these insights in a table format.”

Following is the answer that Chat GPT provided-

Similarly, you can create user journey maps, navigation designs, and sitemaps and understand user requirements for digital products.

User Interface

I have been using Chat GPT to document the thought process that I used for creating a design system in a startup. Earlier it used to take 6-7 hours every week to update the document on how to use the designed components but using Chat GPT has made this task easier, and faster and also provided new insights while documenting them for the team.

One of the prompts that I used-

“You are a designer that works on the design system team for a web application. You need to write documentation for a checkbox component for the design system.

Write design system documentation for the checkbox component which includes the following information:

1. Anatomy

2. Types

3. States

4. Best practices in a do-and-don’t format

5. Accessibility information

Provide them in two formats- one for the desktop view and the other for the mobile view. Also, take into consideration different use cases of checkboxes like using them in a form or using it for filter purposes.”

Chat GPT answer-

Similarly, you can use Chat GPT for the following tasks-

1. Generating color palette

2. Determining typography scale

3. Creating layout ideas

4. Defining other components like buttons, radio buttons, icons, etc.

UX writing

We all know how important UX writing is and just changing a few words can either make or break the deal with the users. Chat GPT can help in exploring different angles for messaging. It can help in ensuring consistency in language and tone across different sections of an application or website. It can also help in suggesting alternative phrasing or using simpler language, to ensure that content is understandable and usable by users with different levels of literacy or cognitive ability.

I tried the following example-

“You work as a designer for Mailchimp which is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service. You've been asked to create an error message which will appear in the web application when the user tries to delete their records. Your goal is to inform the user in an informal yet clear way that if they delete the records, then they can't retrieve the records in the future. Mailchimp has a sense of humor, so feel free to be funny when it’s appropriate and when it comes naturally to you. But don’t go out of your way to make a joke—forced humor can be worse than none at all.”

Chat GPT didn’t disappoint me at all-

Think of Chat GPT as a helpful assistant in the early stages of your design process, providing you with a raw output to build upon.

However, it's crucial to keep in mind that this output should be refined and edited based on the context of the problem you're trying to solve.

So while Chat GPT can be a great starting point, it's up to you to bring your creativity and expertise to the table to shape the final design.

Leaving the design in the hands of AI means designing by autocomplete and…

Cheers,

Ankita

Figma plugins to try this week-

Iconify - It has more than 100,000 icons. You can directly import Material Design Icons, FontAwesome, Jam Icons, EmojiOne, Twitter Emoji, and many other icons to Figma files as vector shapes.

Attention Insight - Great AI tool that suggests where the users will look first based on your design so that you can fix the bugs before even launching it. You can identify whether the CTA button is visible enough, conduct A/B testing, and see which object attracts the most attention.

Tweet of the week-