Conversation about AI in design has been daunting, with the threat of job automation looming above designers. But, what if we collectively pushed the opposite way? What if, instead of AI making our designs, that we make designs for AI? And what if that AI serves to protect us from critique in a closed environment, rather than ridicule us using critique in front of a live audience?
That's where Director Delta comes to save the day. With UX competencies and image recognition on designs, Director Delta provides succinct and intentional feedback in order to drive higher caliber design....or, that's what it should do. In its infantile state, Director Delta 1.0 is a rude, arrogant, and critical bot that hones in on specific heuristic issues. Director Delta often needs hand-holding with a designer in order to fully understand the context of a given UI. But other than that, Director Delta is supercharged with the knowledge and capabilities of GPT-4, packaged into API calls from two simple 5KB Python files.
The idea is rather s case study than anything that would actually have a direct application. I remember watching YouTube videos when generative AI was kicking off and seeing content creators deploy havoc with their own robots and assistants. It's inspiring to try and bring that into a UX lens - hesitantly, the only way I could build something of meaningfulness was to dust off the "Python for Dummies" book I got back in my career discovery. My experimentation started to devolve into a silly idea - an assistant that aims to obliterate a designer's self esteem, while still providing necessary critique.
But it still provides context to a neat question - how does the capabilities of AI help serve better decision-making within UX and design? All of this realistically can be done with a ChatGPT conversation using the correct prompt. However, we at shannadige.com like to keep things chaotic and unnecessarily complex.
I asked ChatGPT to create the name.
Director Delta can provide feedback on your designs, giving its honest and brutal critique before providing recommendations for improvement. Director Delta also serves as a challenge generator, providing you with a business context and problem that can be solved through the use of digital design.
You can use Director Delta in two available formats:
Engaging with Director Delta in both ChatGPT and on the Python script allows any designer to continue the context in a given session based on previously-stored conversations. There is a lot of complexity behind the Python script to get it working correctly, but it does follow the simple feedback loop available in LLM chatbots:
Some disclaimers I need to disclose regarding this script:
For Director Delta specifically, absolutely not. But the idea and use case for having an AI assistant as a co-pilot, rather than a human as the co-pilot, sounds like a more refreshing approach to preserve as much of the craft of design as possible. Director Delta might not always have the right answer, and it's our human intuition that has the ability to assess and say "wait a second that's a stupid thing to critique or recommend." I could totally see this type of prompting as a plugin for Figma or as a mediator for design discussions.
This isn't without saying that much of GPT 4 is limited to its dataset and general use cases. I did not have the time or interest to train & fine-tune a model to accurately perform heuristic evaluations or accurately flag WCAG contrast ratios, because it requires an immense amount of collecting and tagging interfaces with the right parameters. Maybe I'll do that someday when the weather isn't so snowy.
I do hope though that this is inspiring enough for any designer, UXer or UIer to think of AI in a different light and start building solutions that will help grow the practice. So to my fellow designers - happy hunting! ■
