Why Chat GPT is the tool UX Designers cannot ignore

Published in

UX-Design | Content Strategy

8 min readApr 10, 2023

Despite the seemingly clickbaity title, I won’t jump on the hype train here, where I talk about how our lives will change forever or how AI might take over the world, etc…

What I am going to talk about, however, is how Chat GPT might be a helpful assistant for UX Designers, how the AI market might develop, and how the tool might be adopted in the future.

I believe UX designers cannot ignore Chat GPT because…

…it has exciting applications for UX Design
…UX-Designers can learn a lot from its product design
…it’s the fastest-growing platform ever

This article consists of 4 Parts, so feel free to jump around:

# 1 Chat GPT Applications for UX-Designers
# 2 Chat GPT: The tool from a User-Experience Perspective
# 3 AI Tools: Market Development Prediction
# 4 AI: Wide-range Adoption Szenarios

# 1 Chat GPT Applications for UX-Designers

Before I dive into how I use Chat GPT to support my work at the moment, I want to put A HUGE disclaimer —

⚠️ All data generated with Chat GPT should be used solely as a starting point, inspiration, or validated and developed further.

Applications like Chat GPT or other AI-Tools are not at a point where they can replace traditional research.

Here are 6 UX-Applications using Chat GPT:

1. Writing User Stories

Chat GPT is extremely good at writing stories from just a few keywords. It can make your process of developing user stories more effective.

The drawback is that the user stories can become generic and repetitive, but I find it pretty useful overall.

2. Creating User Personas

I have tried this one a few times — the results are mixed. Sometimes Chat GPT came up with specific User Personas, other times, it just described entire user groups.

If you can give more input, Chat GPT could also create more detailed descriptions of pain points and needs, but again — the information is pretty general.

3. Drafting User Journeys & Touchpoints

If you give Chat GPT a description of your business case, product, or service, it will write out a decent customer journey in a few seconds.

It’s useful, even though there is an apparent lack of detail — however, you can very quickly develop ideas and get an overview of the customer journey. I find this extremely helpful in identifying possible gaps.

4. Competitor Analysis & Market Analysis

Chat GPT can quickly list possible competitors with descriptions if you name an industry and focus area.

The downside is that there is (at least now) no way to find out the selection criteria of Chat GPT.

5. Using Chat GPT to generate Placeholder Text

Working with placeholder Text has its downsides — clients can be easily confused by it.

Placeholder Content generated in Chat GPT may partially solve this problem. It can help to create some placeholder headlines or taglines and it can be used to create drafts for microcopy.

💡Sidenote: Don’t forget to replace and refine the content afterward.

6. Writing UX Case Studies

This would probably work for any case study, but if you give Chat GPT a short description of the Case, a few more keywords, and facts, it will write out a detailed case study and even use the typical problem-process-solution structure for it.

I am sure there are a million other ways to use Chat GPT for UX work — have you tried it, and has it worked for you? Leave a comment!

While Chat GPT has interesting applications for UX Designers — it’s also interesting to learn from it from a product design perspective.

This is why UX Designers cannot ignore Chat GPT at all costs — It might influence how we design future products — find out more in Part 2

# 2 Chat GPT: The tool from a Product Design Perspective

Call me old-fashioned, but I am usually not an early adopter of new technologies — If something is really useful, it will find its way into my everyday life, otherwise, it will disappear.

Remember when portable DVD-Players were a thing?

So usually, I sit out the initial hype and then decide whether something is worth looking into.

What I like about Chat GPT from a UX perspective

Ease of use: Chat GPT is not just useable — in my opinion, this application has taken the ease-of-use to the next level. It might be due to the product’s nature — Still, I appreciate how the UI is not cluttered. (Although new features are coming in), I hope they manage to keep this level of ease in the future)
Feedback: Chat GPT is easy to work with thanks to its interaction design. Its ability to keep track of whole conversations creates excellent interaction. Honestly, a way that almost feels collaborative.

What I don’t like about Chat GPT from a UX perspective

Highly different from what we are used to: What are we used to? We are used to search engines. This vastly differs from how we interact and receive answers from Chat GPT. Wide-range adoption of the tool would raise 2 problems:
How can you validate the answers?
How do we achieve the best results?

What we need to sharpen the most within this recent AI-Wave are skills like

critical thinking (Is the content correct, reliable, and verifiable?)
ethics and boundaries (Is it even okay to use this information?)
real applications (Just playing around VS. Using AI for “real world applications”)

After this initial phase, we will experience quite a bit of saturation.

We will grow tired of AI-Texts and AI-Images that are all on the same level of depth and emotion.

While we might be blown away right now, it will become pretty standard and even downright dull — nothing compares to the satisfaction of creating something from scratch.

Can the creation of AI-Content compare to the satisfaction of creating something from scratch? Foto von russn_fckr auf Unsplash

And that’s a wonderful segway for Part 3: Looking at how the market might develop.

# 3: AI Tools: Market Development Prediction

It’s not easy to keep track of all the developments that were — honestly, thrown on the market in the last few months.

Seemingly, there is an AI for everything.

However, if you look at it from a market development perspective, you can see that this is nothing unusual.

As you can see in the image below, when new markets or technologies emerge, there are often a lot of participants that enter the market within a relatively short amount of time (Phase 1)

Subsequently, the demand rises, and the market grows (Phase 2)

However, after a while, when the market becomes too saturated, many providers will leave the market, while others will remain (Phase 3)

It’s hard to say how quickly we will move through this process — It’s not like AI was invented a few months ago. It has been around for a while. It’s just that the latest advancements have stirred up the market and led to rapid growth.

Here you can find more details about the AI market development

My point is that what’s happening with the AI market right now is nothing to be freaked out about because it’s nothing that hasn’t happened in some other shape or form before

Just think back to the “great inventions” of the last years — say, the internet, the iPhone, social media, etc…

There will be AI-Tools that will be part of our everyday life and work — There is no way of telling whether Chat GPT will be one of them, but considering the user numbers, the chances are pretty high.

Let’s look at the numbers in Part 4: wide-range adoption

# 4 AI: Wide-range Adoption

The internet, the iPhone, and Social Media — when they were invented, they all had one thing in common:

While some hugely hyped them, others hugely doubted them. Not everybody adopted them right away — and that’s normal, too.

Technology adoption is a process, as stated in the illustration below:

What’s interesting about Chat GPT, though, is that according to reports from Statista.com, it has reached 1 Million Users in just 5 days.

A milestone that took years to achieve for other popular platforms such as Netflix (3.5 years), Airbnb (2.5 years), or Instagram (2.5 months).

Although this rapid adoption may partly be due to wider overall internet adoption, it’s still the fastest-growing platform ever, reaching an estimated 100 Million Users in January 2023.

Here are more statistics and usage data for Chat GPT

Conclusion

While there are chances in using AI-Tools like Chat GPT, there are also limitations and downsides. While they may support our work, they require us to think critically more than ever.

Let’s summarize why UX-Designers cannot ignore Chat GPT:

First of all, there are a lot of possibilities for UX-Designers with Chat GPT, such as writing user stories, creating user personas, user journeys, case studies, generating placeholder text, and many more.

Secondly, Chat GPT is interesting from a product design perspective — it’s easy to use and may influence future product design.

Lastly, Chat GPT is the fastest growing tool ever and has likely come to stay — so we better learn from it, about it, and with it.

Have you adopted Chat GPT or other AI-Tools into your work?