Sevginur Ak Parlak
Feb 12, 2024
6 min read
A UX Case Study with AI
In the evolving world of UX design, AI has become a game-changer. As a freelance UX designer, I’ve welcomed this change, and integrated various AI tools into my design process.
In this article, I’ll share my experiences with some of these innovative tools: ChatGPT, Miro AI, Figma AI, Adobe Firefly and Uizard and particularly focusing on their application in a case study. The goal is to demonstrate how these tools can save time when preparing case studies for job interviews.
My case study centers on designing a dashboard for the Sundance Film Festival. Initially, I knew little about the festival and had no experience in the ticketing or event industry.
Problem definition
Since I was unfamiliar with the Sundance Film Festival, I began by exploring its website. However, the site didn’t provide the detailed insights I needed. Therefore, I turned to ChatGPT for assistance and asked the following questions:
Can you give me some information about the Sundance Film Festival?
What is the main reason users visit its web platform?
What might someone expect from the Sundance Film Festival platform?
How is the Sundance Film Festival different from other film festivals?
After listing the current content inventory and performing a heuristic evaluation for the current website, I moved on to user studies.
User Interviews:
Once again, I utilized ChatGPT as a starting point for my user interview preparation. I asked the AI:
I am planning to redesign the Sundance Film Festival platform. Before starting the redesign, I want to conduct user interviews. What questions should I ask the users?
With the sample questions provided by ChatGPT, I customized them to fit the context of my project and then conducted interviews with a select group of users.
Benchmark:
When time is limited for extensive benchmarking and identifying competitors through Google searches, I turn to ChatGPT for assistance. I ask the AI:
What are the rivals of this platform? Could you provide some examples for my benchmark?
This approach allows me to quickly gather names of competing entities and focus my benchmarking efforts on specific companies.
Additional questions to ask the AI at benchmark stage:
How do the user interfaces of competing platforms differ?
What trends are currently popular in platforms similar to Sundance Film Festival?
Are there any recent innovations in the film festival platform sector?
Persona:
I begin creating personas by using Miro templates. To build my personas, I engage with ChatGPT, asking questions such as:
Can you write a persona related with this journey? (after explaining the journey)
Can you write a quotation that reflects this persona’s perspective on the subject?
I guide the AI further with follow-up questions to refine the persona details.
Additional questions for AI at this stage could include:
What might be the key motivations for this persona in using the platform?
How might this persona typically interact with a film festival platform?
Can you suggest potential frustrations or pain points this persona might experience?
What would be the ideal user experience for this persona on a festival platform?
Customer Journey Map:
To develop a customer journey map, I utilized ChatGPT for initial guidance. I asked:
Can you outline key stages in a customer journey map for this platform?
Could you identify needs, pains, touchpoints, and opportunities related to each action in the journey?
What are potential oppurtunities and touchpoints for post festival engagement?
User Stories:
For user stories, I’ve found Miro AI to be more effective than ChatGPT.
By using the CMD+K shortcut in Miro, I select the ‘Generate cards with user stories’ option. For my project, I entered ‘The Sundance Film Festival dashboard’ as my product idea. This feature in Miro efficiently helps in generating relevant and useful user stories for my design process.
After selecting a card, I’m using MiroAI to crate more user stories and creating acceptance criteria.
Feature List:
I consult ChatGPT again to assist in the initial stages of development.
I ask:
Can you write a feature list for this platform?
Can you help me to develop an information architecture?
After receiving ChatGPT’s responses, I make necessary adjustments to tailor the feature list and information architecture to the specific needs of the project.
Wireframes:
At the wireframing stage, I experimented with Uizard. However, I found that Uizard’s AI was less effective for detailed inquiries specific to this project. Therefore, I used Uizard primarily as a tool for drawing wireframes.
However you may find the AI useful if you don’t do any of the steps above for problem definition and ideation. It may be a good starting point especially when time is constrained. (By the way, I never used the Uizard AI tool again because the results were quite generic, it needs to improve more to be useful at this stage of the process).
UI Design:
After completing the wireframes, unfortunately there is not any AI tool to draw the UI properly. But you may use ready-made UI libraries to bring your designs alive faster. Here is a list of design libraries that I used before:
Untitled UI
The ultimate Figma UI kit and React component library
Material Design 3
Google’s open-source design system for building beautiful, usable products.
Ant Design 5.0
Help designers/developers building beautiful products more flexible and working with happiness
Hero ui
Make beautiful websites regardless of your design experience.
At the UI stage, I consulted ChatGPT once again for UX writing. Here are some questions that I ask to lead ChatGPT:
Can you write the copies on the landing page of the Sundance Film Festival according to AIDA rules?
What may be the UX copy of the first section? As header description and button?
Can you write me a ux copy for the login screen?
Can you write me a hero message that lead users to buy festival pass tickets?
Write a couple of notification examples for this platform.
Can you write a description for the festival program? It will be seen before the calendar view. People may buy tickets from this page. Write only one sentence.
Can you write a text to lead users to help?
To generate images for the interface, I used tools like the Figma AI plugin, Miro AI, and Adobe Firefly. While they don’t produce high-fidelity visuals, they are sufficient for case study purposes.
You may find the results below:
To wrap up, working on the Sundance Film Festival platform was a mix of usual design work and new AI tools. AI helped me a lot, but I also saw that it can’t replace the creative part that I do. This project tested my skills and taught me how AI and human ideas work together in design. It’s exciting to think about how AI will help more in UX design in the future, mixing technology and our own creative ideas.
