UX-ing with ChatGPT and Midjourney
Everyone knows that AI-generated stuff is all the rage these days. You’ve probably seen a billion articles discussing the numerous ways you can utilise ChatGPT and Midjourney.
Well, today I’m here to share what I’ve learnt while using them, plus some UX-based use cases for these AI tools. By no means am I an expert in them, but I feel that there is deeper untapped potential which hasn’t gone very mainstream at the moment.
Therefore, it is with mixed emotions that I share my exploration of which my job as a UX designer could be made redundant. Like how abacuses put accountants out of their jobs all those years ago y’know (newsflash: they didn’t).
Start doing desk research with ChatGPT
Move aside Google Search. All I want for Christmas is my very own ChatGPT Pro Max in Space Gray. This thing is already capable of doing a large part of my work for me.
Would you look at that? I’m doubtful that everything here is accurate but you can’t deny this is a major head start.
ChatGPT can do affinity mapping too
My experience with ChatGPT is that it is capable of many things — if you figured out how to use it. I gave it a long list of bullet points to see if it could group things for me. Lo and behold:
As you can see, ChatGPT is quite good at grouping similar things. I’m quite happy with the results, though it would be better with a more descriptive header (which you can do yourself).
What’s more interesting is that you can ask ChatGPT to group things using different criteria. For example, I tried getting ChatGPT to group the same bullet points by contradictions.
Super tip: Affinity mapping things by different criteria is a cheat code to crafting more insights!
That’s honestly a fairly good job. Using ChatGPT to theme the points using different criteria can add a new dimension and lens to approaching certain problems.
Get ChatGPT to write some How Might We statements for you
While we are on the topic of grouping things by contradictions, I’ve found that they always make for very challenging problem statements and thus interesting HMWs.
I feel like I could probably come up with HMW statements that work better. Some of these seem a little off. I’m interested to know why ChatGPT provided these statements though.
I feel a little more impressed by its ability to find a reason. Even if some of these HMWs aren’t that great, the reasonings provided would help teach me how to refine my HMW statements in certain ways. The only concern there is if it provides bad reasons as answers. If only I could teach ChatGPT to write better… wait, can I?
Teach ChatGPT to write with the style you want
Asking ChatGPT to simply write something for you is the most uninspired thing you can do with it. So, let’s take it to the next step and teach it how to write instead. What do UX designers have to write the most?
This is a pretty good piece of UX copy. It probably did a better job than me trying to incorporate all those principles too. I’m not even sure I want to continue writing this article anymore because this monstrosity might be doing the writing part of my job too well.
Let ChatGPT teach you how to refine your work
You can teach ChatGPT, but ChatGPT can teach you too! Recall just some paragraphs ago that I talked about using ChatGPT to refine my HMW statements. So this gave me a thought… how about I use ChatGPT to teach me how to craft better insights?
In my role as a UX designer, one of the most misunderstood concepts is the difference between a finding and an insight.
Ah. Lightbulb moment. Since ChatGPT could explain the difference between a finding and insight to me, can ChatGPT tell me if an idea is a finding or an insight?
Wow. This is pretty impressive. For what it’s worth, ChatGPT is not always 100% accurate at telling you whether something is a finding or an insight. Sometimes the way you word something makes it think that it’s an insight when it’s not. Even then, ChatGPT serving as another voice of reason, credibility withstanding, can propel you quite a bit for analysis work!
ChatGPT is a Master of summarising
ChatGPT can summarise well. But don’t just tell it to summarise… tell it to summarise with specific parameters! Why don’t we start with something extreme?
A valiant attempt, but not the best. You’ll see in the next picture that ChatGPT’s 1000-word summary for the whole book had the perfect 3-line summary as its first paragraph. Never mind the quality of the results here, because the point here is to show you what ChatGPT is capable of doing.
I’ve tried 500-word summaries for books but they’re way too short. 1000 words are still too short in my opinion, but that’s the max limit of ChatGPT. This is a fairly informative 1000-word summary of the book though…
But oh, what if you ask ChatGPT to do this at a chapter level?
THIS IS AWESOME. Tell me again… why would you need Blinkist when you have ChatGBlinkT? This is going to save me A WHOLE LOT of time. Sometimes ChatGPT does hallucinate though, you could get it to summarise a phantom chapter and it would still give you a logical result.
Create all sorts of templates and then fill them up
You know when you are trying to create research plans, design system documentation, journey maps, personas etc.? You probably googled for some reference templates before killing your brain cells by thinking up content to populate into them.
Tell you what. You have ChatGPT now.
Your days of producing imaginary content are over. Don’t like what you see? Just tweak it a little to fit what you need. After you’ve done your research, you’re gonna be updating this anyway.
Have words in your work? ChatGPT away!
At this point, you should have gotten a good idea about what you can do with ChatGPT. Honestly, anything with words requires some level of creativity… ChatGPT could do it for you. It could be drafting a design challenge, populating user flows, creating a UX job description, writing your resume, developing a framework for career pathways… the list goes on.
But when words don’t cut it, we have Midjourney
A UX designer’s bread and butter requires images. For however majestic ChatGPT is (at the moment) it doesn’t have image generation as a feature. Let’s start with something simple like repeating patterns that can be used as a background.
While using the prompt, I was thinking that… I kinda like those Telegram and Whatsapp chat wallpapers. Maybe I can use those concepts to generate Christmassy doodles instead?
So I fed Midjourney this image.
Midjourney can take an existing image and make variations of it with prompts. Here’s a sample of it below:
I had to try a few types of prompts before realising that the words “simple” and “doodles” brought me closer to what I wanted. Notice that the prompt has “christmas” but the image isn’t exactly Christmassy. So, I increased the weightage of some keywords.
Increasing the weight to 4 got me some better Christmas doodles! But it also started adding more colour, which isn’t what I want.
I tried many different types of prompts to remove the colour, but I gave up in the end because it felt like a losing battle — Midjourney didn’t seem to know what I wanted.
In the end, I went back to the original image and tried using different prompts there instead. Here’s a sample of one which I was more satisfied with.
Ok… so that’s great and all. Unfortunately, I felt like it was probably easier to have just removed the colour myself. At least I know I’m not going to try to do too much iteration via Midjourney — it’s better off serving us as a starting point.
Regardless, this is not a major thing we have to do anyway. Instead, do you know what would make UX designers super excited? If Midjourney could do more important work like…
Design User Interfaces
For what it’s worth, Midjourney isn’t at the level that it could replace us for fine-tuning screens. However, it’s rather capable of doing the heavy lifting on imagination and creativity. If you need some inspiration, MidJourney’s here for ya.
Here we see some pretty interesting things happening. Most of the images generated are in the “yellow cab” colours. Why don’t we try having it in different colours?
This time we see something just as interesting. Midjourney seems to think that ride-hailing apps should be mobile-based. This makes me want to get Midjourney to render websites too.
These are all mind-blowing samples — but it’s clear that Midjourney isn’t quite there yet when it comes to creating consumption-ready interfaces. Still helpful, but if I ever need ideas, I’ll be exploring collectui first for the time being.
Use Midjourney for storyboarding
Storyboarding is something that anyone could do. UX designers usually do it stickman style because it’s quick and dirty. But what if you could do it fast and fancy?
If you had an idea in mind, it would be easy to craft a 6-panel storyboard with Midjourney. Here’s a very random storyboard about “A Day in a Life of Stormtroopers”.
THIS WAS PRETTY HARD WORK.
It was not easy to get consistent characters for a storyboard. You could get consistent illustration styles, but not so much for characters. And y’know, characters tend to be key in a storyboard.
To be honest I rather like the outcome. But the main goal of using AI to do our work is to save our time… Right now, generating these images would take me a much longer time than drawing stickmen. So maybe stick to the stickmen for now unless you need a fancy-looking storyboard.
Design Icons
Another potentially good sample case to use Midjourney for. Perhaps icons would be easy enough for Midjourney to generate?
Hmm. Not wrong, but not exactly something I could use in my work. It would be really weird to use such icons in modern interfaces. I need this to be even simpler.
Oh, I’m quite happy with this. However, if I truly want to use this for work, I want to be able to have consistent icons in terms of weight, shadow, curves, colour, simplicity etc.
(Would also be great if I could generate this in other formats such as a vector-type file or in transparent .png format, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
So I tried to get rid of the shadows. It worked… somewhat. There’re no shadows in most of the options now, but I didn’t have an icon I liked/would use almost immediately this time. Having to generate multiple options to get where I want is a little too much work for me for now.
Like with all the other previous use cases, I think I’ll be sticking to the classic options (like flaticon) for my needs.
Design Logos
Now… this is something which I feel Midjourney has the highest potential to do well.
In most other UX cases, I already have something I’m thinking about and want Midjourney to accomplish. In the case of designing logos, many times you have nothing in mind to begin with, just an idea.
Here’s a sample of what could be:
Right from the get-go, I’m in love with some of these already! And I couldn’t have come up with something better on my own. I did wish adding words was possible though (but Midjourney is notoriously bad at this).
Still wanted to give it a try anyway. Alas, we only managed to luck into one option where the word “gene” shows up! Perhaps this could work well with a slightly different prompt?
Didn’t get the word “gene” this time. Fairly close though, I could take the top-left option and swap the “g” and “e” around easily. I could also take the top-right option, remove the letter “e”, remove the extra words, and then shift the word “gene” into the centre. Not sure if the prompt made a difference or if this was a simple case of RNG, but I think this is working.
Got one this time! Lucked into one that kinda works. Using Midjourney to create logos with words wouldn’t be the best idea, but it’s still viable.
Coming up with Illustrations for slides
You know when you have to draft slides for work? And sometimes you want to fill out the white space with illustrations so that it’s representative and yet not too wordy?
Midjourney comes in handy for this. If you specify a particular style, it can also help to keep your illustrations consistent throughout your deck. In this case, it’s quite similar to storyboarding, except you don’t need to have the same character appear throughout the images. This makes things much easier!
These images are fantastic, I rather like them, but let’s test out other versions where we use lines.
Perfect! This is going to be a real time-saver. I’ve always found that the right illustrations are difficult to come by when making slides, so Midjourney is going to be very valuable for me when I design slides in the future.
Have “art” in your work? Midjourney still has some ways to go!
Unlike ChatGPT, Midjourney hasn’t gotten to a stage where it could support UX work that well. There are still serviceable and viable things you could do with Midjourney, but for most parts, you would need to do some fine-tuning of your own.
If you are not using it for UX work, however, Midjourney is fantastic at creating photorealistic images. Want to know what Mona Lisa looks like in real life?
Super tip: By the way, if you use Midjourney’s search tool, you might find something that works for you much faster than figuring out a prompt for yourself! The tool even allows you to copy the same prompt used for that image, so you can always steal those prompts and tweak it for yourself.
Final thoughts
I enjoyed exploring these tools and I think both tools have some place in our work as UX Designers. Not using them is a waste, but over-reliance on them to do your work is also a potential issue. Always make sure you have good foundations in place before relying on something for work, otherwise in a situation without tools, you’ll be helpless.
In the meantime, enjoy them while they are free and figure out how they could help you in your work!
