Questions About Conversation Design in a Prompt-Based World I Don't Have the Answers To
This growing list has been keeping me up at night, and I want to admit that I don't know a lot of things. Maybe you have the answers, but I don't yet!
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately (Aren’t we all? I can’t believe this is how I’m opening this blog post), and I mean really racking my brain about the new world of conversation design and what it means for me. This is not another fake-controversial “conversation design is dead” post, because it’s not, and we all know it.
The way that I (a professional conversation designer who actually speaks very little about the real CxD work I do) design is shifting and changing, and I’m being asked to picture a future of how script-based design and prompt-based design fit together…and it’s a hard question to answer. It’s one of those questions that keeps me up at night, makes me doubt if I even know what I’m doing at all, makes me wonder if everyone has it figured out but me.
But do they? How? Who? I’ve been asking a lot of others within my conversation design community about their use of LLMs and AI at their companies, what tools they’re using to design now, what frameworks their products are built on, and how their processes have evolved. Not once have I received the same answer from two people, and a lot of times, I haven’t received any answers at all. And that’s completely okay. I wouldn’t have worked for a startup for 7 years if I weren’t comfortable operating in a world where I didn’t know the answer to everything. I read Elaine’s 4 years in conversation design retrospect this morning and was just nodding my head the entire time, as I always do with how brilliantly she writes, and it really inspired me to be more open about the things I’m questioning, because aren’t we all just wondering how to navigate this world as conversation designers at this point?
Some of you might come to me when you have a question about conversation design, or wonder how to find a job in it, or what tools to use, or who to know, where to learn, or something else. Most of the time, I have an answer or I’m willing to find one for you, or connect you with someone who does. That’s my favorite thing to do as a person in this industry. If you were ever wondering, no, I don’t get anything out of it. I just genuinely enjoy helping and getting to know all of you. It might sound weird to you, but the internet is my home, and whenever I can continue to be there, when people want to talk to me, when I can share and learn and connect…that’s where I’ll be.
So now, I have a lot of questions. Some of you might have the answer, or maybe it will just be reassuring to you to know that someone else also doesn’t have the answer. We’re all figuring this out together. Having worked in conversation design for nearly 7 years, I’ve experienced firsthand how quickly tools and frameworks can change, and how the evolution of technology can change our approach, too. To me, it’s always worth continuing to ask questions and explore how others are doing things or ideas they have for new ways of approaching design, no matter how much or how little experience they have in the industry.
If you have thoughts, if you’re working on this, please share them! Leave a comment here, send me a message, or share them on your own. I would love to learn from you 💖
My growing list of questions about conversation design for hybrid or prompt-based experiences…
How can people design a hybrid experience to best communicate prompts alongside scripted dialogue to those who will be building it?
If you aren’t using a platform like Voiceflow to host (they’re great at that, that’s for sure), how and/or where do you store, iterate, and version your prompts?
When you’re tasked to write prompts for your team, what’s your first step? If you’re converting a legacy script-based experience to something more prompt-based, how do you approach that?
Is there a certain way you write them that will work best for translating to code? Do you add them directly to the codebase for your product, or somewhere else?
How do you run A/B tests or track the performance of your prompts, if they’re generating unique or slightly varied content some or most of the time?
How do you decide which prompts apply to the overall system, vs only portions of your experience (question-level), or only certain accounts if you work with multiple clients?
Does your company have a proprietary tool or framework you use to design and/or deploy? If they do, were you involved in creating that?
How can people present these types of projects, and prompt design in general, in their portfolio?
You might be looking at this list and think some feel obvious to you (if they do, please tell us!), and maybe now think that I don’t know as much as you thought I did about conversation design. Truly, I probably wouldn’t be a very good designer if I “knew everything,” don’t you think?
Until next time ✌️
Just a girl online