🔀 Create user flow diagrams with ChatGPT

Hey there 👋

📣 Product Prompts (this newsletter) is now part of a bigger AI-for-product-people ecosystem I've called ShipGPT. I won’t bore you with the details of why, but here’s the link to the new home page, with details of the new membership plan and all the goodies that come with it!

🙌 And a huge shout out to ShipGPT member Andrew for very kindly helping with the new logo design!

In today’s edition:

• How to train ChatGPT to generate user flow diagrams

• How to make someone called Claude your teammate in Slack

• How to generate 3D object using prompts

• and more 👇

I’m Martin of Product Prompts. I’ve co-founded multiple startups (fintechs) and led corporate ventures, and now offer product strategy consultancy services, including helping forward-thinking clients with the knowledge, tools and training to figure out their AI strategy for their products and internal workflows. Get in touch to learn about how I could help you.

💬 Prompt Deep-dive: Generate user flow diagrams with ChatGPT-4

I wanted to see if ChatGPT could help with saving time in the product design process, specifically with user flow diagrams - or at least to create a rough first visual draft.

It’s recommended you use ChatGPT-4 for this (currently available for ChatGPT Plus subscribers). GPT-3.5-turbo probably doesn’t have the context window (i.e. conversation memory) capability you need, so it might get a bit lost and hallucinatory.

💡 When ChatGPT plugins are rolled out, and a 3rd party like Miro or Figma builds a more high-fidelity version for this use case, then this will be no doubt be improved hundred-fold. But for now, plugins are only being released very gradually.

Step 1: Sense-check where ChatGPT’s head is

First we need to prime or “train” ChatGPT with what constitutes best practice for user flows, so we start by checking its base knowledge, very simply:

Step 2: Use these best practices to generate a user flow

At this point, you could choose to refine ChatGPT’s understanding of best practice, based on your particular design process, with a follow-up prompt.

And you could also get it to help you through each step, one-by-one.

For this deep-dive, we’re going to fast-track to “Map out user flows”.

Step 3: Let’s get a suggested flow

OK! We now have a really useful steer on the information that ChatGPT is expecting, in order to sufficiently answer our request. We need to give it some context.

Now we get a typically GPT-4 detailed written suggestion:

This is already pretty useful as an initial steer. I like how it adds in smaller details we may have missed, such as the need to communicate through the app.

Step 4: Produce a diagram

A text-based flow is fine, but why not push CHatGPT to its limits? Now it’s time to use one of its least known capabilities: the ability to create tables and diagrams. It does this using “ASCII art”.

Well that’s pretty cool, but the problem here is that ChatGPT has decided to only give us an example of the visual representation. But we want more!

So let’s push for it to complete the diagram. This needs a carefully worded prompt otherwise you’ll end up with a default answer like “you need to use Figma”. Of we course we know we could, but we’re looking for a completed reference point to use a starting point, before adding some polish to the final version.

Here’s an example of not prompting specifically enough - you might decide to give up here and just take ChatGPT’s output as final:

But here’s where our prompting skills come in handy.

Step 5: Get specific and address the “objections”.

“Can you please visually represent all of this? Where something is not technically feasible, just display what you can - don't let this prevent you from trying.”

We did it!

🛠️ Cool new tools

Claude for Slack - meet your new teammate.
Claude is a Large Language Model similar to ChatGPT, but from a company called Anthropic. To date it has only really been publicly accessible through Poe, the AI chatbot app from Quora.

But now Slack, the comms tool favoured by product teams everywhere, is adding Claude (they already added a ChatGPT bot a few weeks ago).

Claude can remember your entire Slack thread or pull content from websites you share with it. Claude is certainly comparable to ChatGPT, which is a major feet, and it has a lot of early fans, so it’s going to be interesting to see how adoption plays out. Early tests indicate Claude is marginally better at creative tasks, and seems to have a more natural conversational feel not so good at coding.

Spline AI - Generate 3D objects, animations, and textures using prompts
Just watch the video…

Thanks for reading, and happy prompting!

Martin, Chief Prompt Officer
PS - become a ShipGPT member and get the ultimate AI toolkit for product professionals, plus be part of the best community discovering how to leverage AI to ship better products, faster.