In today’s fast-paced world of UX research, every day that you lag behind in utilizing generative AI solutions like Chat GPT, you risk losing your competitive edge. If this sounded a bit dramatic, it's intentional - aiming to get UXers on their toes and inspire them to embrace the game-changing potential of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is everywhere; from marketers to product managers, everyone is using it for all sorts of stuff ranging from writing to analyzing data. As UX researchers, you must leverage ChatGPT to reduce your workload, save time, and focus more on high-impact work, such as research plans.
Not sure how to leverage ChatGPT in UX research? In this post, we will cover six compelling ways to use ChatGPT as a UXer. Also, we will cover Four ways NOT to use it. OK let's jump into the ways you can use ChatGPT.
{{cta-trial}}
6 Impactful Ways to Leverage ChatGPT as a UX Researcher
1. Find Competitors
Identifying your competitors and understanding their offerings is crucial for staying informed and finding inspiration in the market. While searching online can be useful, leveraging ChatGPT can provide you with even more assistance in this regard.
If you're seeking information about your competitors and their key features, simply ask ChatGPT to provide a concise summary of their offerings. This way, you can quickly access valuable insights and make informed decisions to stay competitive in your industry.
Prompt I gave: Provide a list of at least five global Online Survey Tools for Gathering Feedback, along with a summary of their key features and notable aspects of their user experience. The list should highlight what makes each player unique. When evaluating each platform, consider aspects such as ease of use, multilanguage support, and the ability to create personalized surveys.
2. Create a Discussion Guide
Crafting an effective discussion guide is a critical component of your testing plan, as it serves as a roadmap to uncover valuable insights and ensures productive research sessions. However, it can take time to begin if you haven't created a discussion guide earlier.
Fortunately, with the assistance of ChatGPT, you can generate an initial draft to kickstart the process and refine it further to meet your specific needs. This collaboration allows you to leverage the power of AI to simplify and enhance your discussion guide creation process, empowering you to conduct more impactful user research.
{{cta-trial}}
Prompt I gave: Create an effective discussion guide for User Research.
3. Get Ideas to Make a Case for UX Research
As a user researcher, you know that UX research is essential, but you need to prove that when it comes to getting buy-ins from stakeholders. Use ChatGPT to help you with that or any other question you have about user research.
Prompt I gave: How to make a case for user research to convince stakeholders? Give me a brief overview in 4-5 points.
4. Use ChatGPT to Create Questions for a User Interview
Let's say you are an online jewelry retailer, and your target users are females, and you need to hire people who match these criteria and ask them questions about their shopping experience on your website. Let's see if ChatGPT can help us find the right questions.
User research is rapidly evolving, and staying at the forefront is essential for maintaining relevance in today's competitive landscape. Discover these exciting emerging trends that can empower your business to outpace the competition, deliver exceptional user experiences, drive long-term revenue growth, and launch new products and services successfully.
Prompt I gave: Craft effective interview questions for online jewelry shoppers.
5. Elevate Your User Interview Questions
Unlocking valuable insights from user interviews hinges on asking the right questions. So, refining your questions for deeper insights and design improvement is crucial. You can leverage ChatGPT to enhance your interview questions and gather valuable user feedback.
{{cta-trial}}
Prompt I gave: Enhance my existing list of user interview questions to ensure they are non-biased and open-ended-
What do you think as you look at the web page?
What’s your (first) impression of this feature?
What do you think this [button] does or will do?
Where do you start?
When and where do you think someone would use this [tool]?
6. Translate User Interviews
If you want to translate your user interviews into another language, you can pass it to ChatGPT to do the work. Simply provide the text, and ChatGPT will handle the task accurately and conveniently. In fact, you can also use it to make notes from your transcripts.
Prompt you can give: Below is a transcript of my interview with xx. Translate into French. Don't forget to add the transcript of your user interview recording.
Related Read: Artificial Intelligence in User Research: 6 Things It Can and Can't Do.
4 Ways Not to Use ChatGPT
While ChatGPT is an advanced technology, it is not a replacement for UX researchers. It is still in its initial stages and, like any other technology, cannot provide a 100% guarantee of information accuracy.
ChatGPT can aggregate and summarize data, but it lacks the complete context of your business and users. For 100% reliable and entirely relevant answers, it requires the necessary information and understanding of your product or service.
1. Don't Use ChatGPT to Build Your Research Plan
We all know that a user research plan is pivotal to a research project - it acts as an overview and helps us kick off the project. ChatGPT can offer a helpful overview of a research plan and provide simple suggestions, but it cannot create a comprehensive research plan for your project.
While suggestions for user interview questions and discussion guides can be valuable, they do not constitute a detailed plan.
However, ChatGPT can provide valuable guidance on where to begin for junior UX researchers starting out.
{{cta-trial}}
2. Don't Use ChatGPT to Create Your Website Usability Testing Questions
Usability testing plays a crucial role in ensuring a user-friendly website. It can help you identify areas of improvement, but only if you ask the right questions. The right usability testing questions will help you understand how easy it is for users to use your website.
While ChatGPT can assist in creating usability testing questions, it should be used as a starting point or to enhance your questions—not as the sole source.
Why? Because ChatGPT lacks the ability to analyze your specific website and predict user experience issues. It can only provide general examples of potential problems users may encounter while browsing your website. To ensure your usability testing questions are accurate and tailored, it's essential to consider your website's specific context and characteristics.
3. Don't Use ChatGPT to Analyze Your Transcripts
Attempting to analyze transcripts by inputting them into ChatGPT is not effective. It cannot comprehend large amounts of text, such as transcripts.
Though you can use AI-powered user research platform to analyze your transcripts, highlight them, and accurately tag them to get value from your user interview recordings.
4. Don't Use ChatGPT to Analyse User Behavior
One of the main goals of UX research is to uncover users' true emotions.
When conducting user interviews, most UX researchers try to understand users deeply by analyzing user behavior, such as body language and tone of voice.
However, Chat GPT cannot do this job for you. Though AI-powered technologies such as eye-tracking and facial coding can help you understand your users better.
Related Read: Eye Tracking in Usability Testing: What Is It & Why It Is Useful?
Final Thoughts:
Generative AI's role in user research is not about replacing human input but working hand in hand with it.
While AI can automate certain research tasks and provide valuable insights, it cannot replicate the human qualities of creativity, empathy, and critical thinking crucial to understanding users better and creating a user-centered design. And we all know the main goal of user research is not just to collect data — it's about understanding the people behind the data.
As UX researchers, we should harness the power of ChatGPT as a tool to enhance our skills and empower us to create more impactful and delightful user experiences.
We can better understand the user and unlock optimal design outcomes by finding the right balance between AI and human expertise.
{{cta-trial}}
