The Ultimate ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for UX/UI Designers

By now you’ve surely heard about how ChatGPT is being used by writers, marketers, software developers and even doctors and attorneys.  But have you considered how it could be used in the field of UX/UI?  It might not be the most obvious use case, but ChatGPT could be a game-changer for your UX/UI projects.

In this cheat sheet, we’ll look at practical ways UX designers can harness the power of this super-intelligent chatbot for better designs and user experiences.

• Craft personas
• Ideate designs
• Create research surveys
• Generate placeholder text
• Create wireframes
• Create user journey maps
• Create a color palette
• Suggest new feature requests
• Research design trends
• Design interactions and flows
• Know what UX tools to use

User experience all begins with personas.  But that has to begin with…YOU!  And wouldn’t it be nice if you could have some creative assistance in coming up with realistic and appropriate personas for your product or service?  Well, you’re in luck.  Just describe it to ChatGPT and ask for a little help.

If you already have some details in mind for the persona, just include those in the prompt.  But it’s nice that it can also start from scratch and produce something very realistic.

In the early stages of a project when you just need to brainstorm and throw ideas around, ChatGPT can provide a never-ending supply of inspiration.  In your prompt, describe at a high level what you’re building, then let it run wild.

In user experience, it’s important to get feedback early and often—whether in the initial design stages or when you actually have something to test with users.  But coming up with effective survey questions can be tedious, which is why you should get some help from your friend ChatGPT.

If you’re in the early stages of ideation, you could ask something like:

The surveys can come back in a variety of formats, but here’s one example:

If you’re beyond the initial ideation stage, and users have been interacting with an application, you can create a survey looking for more specific feedback.  Perhaps you ask something like:

And you could get a survey that looks something like:

As you’re creating your wireframes and prototypes, at some point you will inevitably fall back on the old “Lorem ipsum” placeholder text to build out the UI.  And, while interesting (“Hey ChatGPT, what exactly does Lorem ipsum mean?”), some real-world text will resonate better with users and make your designs look more polished.

But what to use for text in the early stages?  ChatGPT can be a huge help here.  Describe the pages you need the text for, and also provide details about the tone or style of the writing to make it align with your brand or culture.

And like magic, you’ve got some solid placeholder text you can use in place of Latin.

Okay.  We’re not really creating wireframes since ChatGPT (at least for now) only outputs text, but you can totally use it to describe a wireframe and its major components.  As always, provide some context for what you’re building, and then ask it for some help with the wireframe.

ChatGPT will dutifully come up with suggestions for the page, including the header section with navigation and such, and then a description for the main components on the page.

Now, this one is pretty cool.  User journey maps are a useful way to visualize the process that a user goes through to accomplish some goal.  Like registering for an account on a site, or adding items to a cart to then checkout.

User journey maps can vary in format, but they typically use a table or grid, and capture a user’s steps in the journey, as well as what they’re thinking and feeling along the way.  If you don’t have anything specific in mind, you can keep your prompt generic.  But if you have specific columns or other things in mind, then be sure to specify that in your prompt.

The responses can vary widely with these, but you’ll usually get a solid starting point and then you can tweak things for your specific case.

There’s an art and science to picking the right color palette for your project.  It should obviously align to your brand, but there are other factors to consider as well, such as the psychological impact of colors, how colors work together (or not) and so on.  If you aren’t an expert in color theory, or if you just want some inspiration to get you started, then ask ChatGPT to give you some suggestions that might work well with the type of software you’re building.

And ChatGPT will come back with some suggestions, complete with the reasons behind each color.

Who knew that ChatGPT could help you improve your app by suggesting new features to add?  It’s true.  Describe your app, and then ask for suggestions based on common problems in similar apps.

And our reliable AI assistant comes back with some really good suggestions for things you could add to your app.  You could even feed these ideas back into ChatGPT and ask it to create a feedback survey to test them out (like we saw at the top of the article).

Design trends in UX are constantly changing, and it’s good to stay up-to-date with what’s happening.  This one does have a caveat, though.  If you don’t know, ChatGPT’s training data is somewhat dated, so it won’t be able to answer questions about things that have happened in the last day or week or month (or even year, as of this writing).  But it can still be useful for identifying popular trends through whatever date the training data ended.  And over time, the training data will likely become more recent, so the output will only get better.

ChatGPT will come back with some perhaps-slightly-outdated-but-still-very-relevant trends that you can use in your application.

Interaction design is a huge part of user experience—from something as simple as a hover-over effect on a button, to the overall flow of the checkout process on an e-commerce application.  If you don’t know where to start, or just want to optimize what you already have, ChatGPT can give you some pointers.

For a checkout flow, you could ask something like:

And our chatbot will give us some good suggestions to get started:

Or to get best practices and inspiration, ask something like:

And get a response like this:

n the world of UX, there’s no shortage of tools and software to use, and there are new things popping up all the time.  Whether you’re starting from scratch, or feel like it’s time to upgrade from existing tools, ChatGPT can help.

If you have a specific tool in mind, you can get a list of pros and cons, and compare it with other tools.  Or if you don’t even know where to start, you can ask for a list or comparison table of many.

You’ll get back a comprehensive list of tools with the details you asked for.  With this one, be sure to validate price and details like supported operating systems, as this information could be outdated due to the recency of ChatGPT’s training data.

Wrapping up

If you started this article a bit skeptical that ChatGPT could be used in the field of user experience, then hopefully by now you’re convinced.  It’s a handy sidekick for the multidimensional world of UX/UI, providing inspiration and getting you started on a variety of day-to-day tasks.

But we can only do so much here together .  If you liked this article, then you’ll love these other resources about UX and ChatGPT.

• User Experience Design Fundamentals

• User Experience Tips and Tricks for Developers

• Interaction Design: The Big Picture

• Getting Started on Prompt Engineering with Generative AI