Photo by Sora Shimazaki: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crop-unrecognizable-office-worker-standing-with-papers-in-hand-5668765/

“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
• Go through the time-consuming process of figuring out who this person is (by talking with co-workers, your boss, and a whole bunch of other people)

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.

Want to base your entire business off of this ‘synthetic user’?

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.