ChatGPT can solve a significant storytelling roadblock: who am I talking to?
Understand what job roles care about through ChatGPT
“Let’s talk about that with Bill. He’s the VP of product, so he should be able to help us with that.” My manager said, leading me to yet another unproductive meeting.
Whether it’s questions around the design, escalating design ideas, or sharing user research insights, sometimes you’ll find yourself introduced to a new person, with about a sentence of background as an afterthought.
Your manager may have known Bill for 20 years and gone to the same school together, but this is you meeting someone brand new who may make important decisions around the UX of the product.
This is when most designers do one of two things:
Present the same thing to this new person, and rely on your manager to smooth any difficulties out
However, ChatGPT has offered a 3rd choice: it can allow us to quickly understand the basics of what that stakeholder will care about. That, in turn, can help you use design storytelling to engage and persuade them to take action.
We must understand the difference between the person and the role of doing that.
ChatGPT can generate empathy…with job titles, not people.
First, I know about the controversy of using ChatGPT to understand people.
Some very foolish people have tried to do “AI-based research,” which has tried to replace talking with the users and doing user research with ChatGPT. That doesn’t work: Debbie Levitt has a great article about why that is the case.
So why am I advocating for something very similar? The simple fact of the matter is Chat GPT is suitable for building empathy around roles, not users.
To explain why, let’s consider user personas. We often create these to capture our target user group and demographics, but it probably only takes a single user test to see how users differ from our personas.
Maybe this guy hasn’t touched a desktop in years since he does everything on a phone and tablet. Or this woman might be a power user who wants the ability to customize and use everything. While the persona might capture some of the defining features of our users, it’s unlikely to capture every last detail.
This isn’t a new problem, either: the US Air Force ran into this problem when they designed a cockpit for the ‘average’ pilot, only to discover that none of over 4,000 pilots fit into the average dimensions.
However, AI-based tools like ChatGPT need a standardized (and expected) pattern between users to provide any semblance of valuable data. Otherwise, they’ll often provide very generic answers.
This is where we can leverage job titles, roles, and responsibilities.
These tend to be a little more standardized than users: look on any job site, and you’ll see a couple of roles and responsibilities that appear all the time when you look up a specific job.
In addition, these responsibilities are often directly tied to what a particular job cares about, which makes it helpful to ask about and understand as a designer.
ChatGPT can’t tell you anything about Bill, the VP of product. But it can tell you about what people typically hold the “VP of Product” job title value and some strategies to approach talking with them.
Once you know that, you have a starting point for the design storytelling process.
Empathizing with stakeholders allows you to use design storytelling
Design storytelling is one of our most potent tools for engaging and persuading audiences, and one of the core tenets of that process is that you’re not giving a generic presentation. Instead, you’re trying to tell a story centered around potentially persuading one person who can drive action, to engage with your information.
Design storytelling doesn’t mean completely re-doing a presentation for each person you present to. Instead, you understand what they care about and cater your presentation to those needs.
For example, imagine that you presented to your design manager, and one of the key findings was that the “Saved Products feature isn’t working well, since users aren’t able to find what they saved to purchase a product.”
Imagine you’re presenting to the VP of Product, who might care about revenue. You might re-phrase that as “We have users who save Products to purchase later, only to be unable to find them again. This results in lost revenue.”
The key insights haven’t changed much: instead, you’re focusing on the specific tensions that this particular person may have and translating a (largely) UX finding into something that matters to them.
In other words, once you understand their job title, responsibilities, and what they care about, you can leverage the two crucial components of design storytelling: narrative and tension.
This is the basic form of design storytelling, but it requires more understanding of the person you’re talking to. This is where ChatGPT prompts can help.
2 ChatGPT prompts to help you understand a role and priorities
I’ve used these few ChatGPT prompts to understand more about specific roles. I’m sure these prompts can be optimized further, but you can probably use them as is.
ChatGPT prompt: “I’m a designer meeting with the VP of Product for the first time. What should I know about that role which will help influence my design?”
One of the first and most straightforward prompts is to ask about a job role and how it can influence your design.
There are a few elements to this prompt that can give you enough information to work with. The first and most important is to emphasize your role as a designer and that this is focused on what you need to know, meeting them from the first time.
This way, you’re not just hearing a general job description but what a Designer needs to know about them. In addition, by emphasizing that you’re meeting with them, you can hear specific tips about how you may act with them.
However, sometimes you’re not just in a meeting with one person: it can often be a joint meeting with others.
This is where the following prompt can help.
ChatGPT Prompt: Imagine you’re presenting user research to your Product Manager and Engineering team, and a VP of Product decides to attend. How should I change the structure of my user research to accommodate for them?
This is a prompt that is often an everyday use-case scenario. You’ll be presenting to your regular team, and suddenly a high-level person wants to stop by and listen in.
In these cases, you may need to make some changes, as you are now faced with a slightly tricky situation: you now have the danger of the HiPPO (The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the room.
To avoid the presentation or design recommendations being dominated by this new person, this prompt can provide a little background into how the team dynamic should change, as well as several ideas on how to avoid the trickiness of this new person coming in.
However, these are only rough guidelines for people with a specific job title.
Learning how to talk to different roles is a crucial skill for designers
Once again, I have to emphasize that ChatGPT, in this case, is only helpful in understanding the job role rather than the person. Building empathy and understanding of the person you’re working with takes time and effort.
However, the fact of the matter is, as a designer, you’ll often find yourself talking to a wide range of people that many other roles don’t. From workers in the field to C-level executives, you may find yourself talking to a wide range of people.
Understanding who these people are and what they care about broadly can help you with these interactions. That’s the power ChatGPT offers you, and it can make your first time talking with a new person much more productive.
So the next time you suddenly find yourself introduced to a new person you know nothing about, consider turning to ChatGPT to get a sense of what they may care about.
Doing so can allow you to have a much more productive first meeting and use the power of design storytelling.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.