My new best friend is a custom GPT

Building my designer 'second brain'

Last weekend I started an AI (prompt engineering) course because yes, that’s what happens when I am left unsupervised.

Part of the course talked about creating custom GPTs with a specific knowledge base.

This got my brain firing on all cylinders.

Because my absolute dream would be to be able to talk to my book shelves.

Why I need a new friend

In my current role, I’m creating design and research methodologies for increasingly complex and hyper-specific business and customer scenarios. I’m in-house. When I worked in agencies, I could run around the network until I found another designer with a boat load of broad design industry experience to bounce ideas around with. Now I don’t have that luxury.

My choice is either wait until one of my UX mates isn’t busy at their own job, or re-read all the books on my book shelf.

But what if I could put all the books on my book shelf into a person who could sit with me and discuss the minutiae of design methodologies.

😍😍😍

Enter, Poe.com

I hunted around the net for a bit, got baffled by all the different GPTs available (and the need to pay for them all separately) ended up on Reddit (inevitably) and discovered.. Poe.

Poe allows you to pay once to access a whole load of GPTs - from ChatGPT4 to Gemini, Perplexity, Llama, Grok, Deepseek and many more. There are also loads of custom GPTs that other people have created and shared.

(Subscription model - you sign up and pay for an allowance of ‘credits’ which you use via conversations)

Creating my new best friend

In a previous attempt to create a custom GPT on Character.AI, it didn’t quite work. I used a lot of my articles and created a character that was a bit of a know-it-all pain in the *ss.

No further comment on that. Needless to say some self-reflection occurred!

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This time, I knew what I wanted to achieve when I wrote my character definition; specifically friendly, and a good balance between ‘knowing what good looks like’ and ‘not being a purist’ when it comes to shaping or proposing methods.

I also built it on ChatGPT4. I wanted to try something else but as this is currently the most human-conversation-style GPT, I used this as the base. What I was trying to avoid was a robot friend.

For the knowledge base I used a ton of resources I’ve amassed over the years, including publicly available writings of the likes of Alan Cooper (for all things UX), Luke W (for all things forms and mobile), Donna Spencer (for IA) and so forth.

I covered overall end-to-end UCD methods at a project level, all the way down to content design and workshops.

Meet my new design bestie

So here is ChattyDesigner! The publicly available UX methods guru who is a combination of me, standing on the shoulders of giants.

I’ve spent many hours working through problems with him, including: