Design Document Creator
What Is It?
One of my department’s most successful initiatives was the creation of Talespin University (or TSU). TSU was designed to help creators jump-start their usage of Talespin’s custom authoring tool, CoPilot Designer. We created different lessons, resources, and videos to help users understand everything from how to write effective dialog to how to deploy their finished projects. This initiative was a major success in supporting new creator onboarding.
The design document creator was designed to be a valuable addition to TSU. Through this conversational interface, I wanted to partially automate the creation of design documents by allowing users to engage in a collaborative brainstorming session with a support assistant chatbot.
How Did You Build It?
For the design document creator, I wanted the user to feel they were speaking to a trusted friend and advocate. Design work can be intimidating, particularly for novice users, so I wanted the chatbot to adopt a supportive, empathetic tone. To facilitate this, I began by creating a character persona for the chatbot- Jet Sterling, an expert learning experience designer.
I built out the actual chatbot in Voiceflow. It was designed to use blended pre-determined branching responses and generative AI responses. I built out a knowledge base for Jet to fine-tune the model and tested the prompts to ensure Jet’s generated responses were of a high quality. I also experimented with different models (including GPT-4, Claude 2, and GPT 4 turbo) to figure out which model hit the optimal balance of quality and speed at different points in the conversation.
What Makes this Project Unique?
This project was unique because co-creation and collaboration can be a challenging task between humans, and is even more challenging between a human and a chatbot. I wanted to strike the right balance between ensuring the human creator retained creative control and not creating unneccessary cognitive load for the user. I also wanted to make the bot have a recognizable tone of voice, to support the emotionally vulnerable side of any creative endeavor.
Here’s a detailed view of the chatbot flow, with one of the generative prompts to the right. The prompt references a few variables that were tracked throughout the conversation.
What Was the Impact of this Project?
This chatbot was integrated into Talespin University and was used to create design documentation by many creators. It received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Product team internally and from users who created design plans with it. The Product team at Talespin is currently looking into ways to integrate it directly into the authoring tool.
Show Me!
You can try out chatting with our design document (ERD) creator, Jet Sterling, by clicking through to the embedded prototype or clicking this link.