Balsamiq - How Balsamiq uses AI

The latest news from Balsamiq:
A peek into our ChatGPT conversations

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Ciao friends,

It’s Arielle again, this month with thoughts on a highly requested topic: AI. We know many of you got into it over the last few months, and we have too. Our Slack's been alive with AI chatter since May, and yep, we've officially welcomed a ChatGPT subscription into our books. We’re even testing how AI might make it into our product one day!

While we believe it's not a replacement for our human touch, we know AI is the future (er, maybe present, at this point), and see it as a good friend in our quest for simplicity and efficiency. After a few months of deeper exploration in AI-enabled tools, here’s what we’re learning:

Inside a founder’s chats

Peldi, our founder and CEO, is constantly learning new ways to use ChatGPT, often from YouTube or TikTok. Not one for unnecessary chatter, he's been using AI to streamline workshops (we’ve been working on our group visions and missions), generate images to illustrate metaphors, stimulate brainstorming, and summarize meeting notes. Something he recently learned:

Lucky for Peldi, Ali, one of our developers, was already a pro at setting up custom instructions for his whole ChatGPT environment. After Ali showed how he set custom instructions to get ChatGPT to know his operating system, level of expertise, and communication preference, Peldi added two custom instructions of his own: no yapping and answer in bullet points if you can.

Now his chats move faster, with Peldi being able to scan the bullet points for the right information. If you prefer bullet points to blocks of text, you can try this too.

Leaving the tedious dev work to the bots

Many of our developers have embraced other AI tools, like GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q, in addition to ChatGPT. Between custom instructions and lots of different AI-enabled tools, they're cutting down on endless search engine quests, focusing more on creative problem-solving, and yes, enjoying the occasional AI-generated dinosaur image for project codenames.

AI has been great for boring configuration sections or trivial implementations where the code isn’t too complex.

As Stefano, one of our other developers, says, “It's akin to assisted driving on a car. You still have to hold the wheel, but in the long run, you end up less tired.”

UX, Support, and Marketing: AI as an assistant

Our Support team has been experimenting with Help Scout’s AI tools to help us better contextualize responses from customers. While all our email responses are still 100% human, AI summaries help us get quick recaps in case we need to hand off cases to other team members, or translate questions from another language without switching tools.

In Marketing, we’ve been leaning on AI to spark creativity and parse trends. Laura Lei, our graphic designer, used it to generate some ideas for a new illustration library she’s building.

I often use it to generate ideas for workshop outlines, articles, subject lines, or as an editor for tone and grammar. We still write things ourselves—but this saves us a ton of time from writer’s block!

Something we’ve found success in is defining roles for ChatGPT, like “You are an expert editor” in the chat, or building a custom chatbot. This is one I named CopyBot, trained as a copywriter & editor for Balsamiq:

And like Peldi, we also lean on AI for organizing projects or summarizing reports. Mike, our head of UX and UX Group Manager, does too. He even shared a few of his use cases and prompts with me:

Coming up with an outline for how to discuss a new topic.

You are Jared Spool and you have deep knowledge of using UX Metrics for measuring user experiences with products. Create an agenda for a product team to have a 1.5 hour discussion about UX metrics and select the metrics that are appropriate for a UX group.

Creating text for wireframes. For example in creating a News Template for our Templates feature, I used these prompts in Chat GPT:

1. You are a writer for the New York Times. Write a fake article about how a couple breaking up can ruin a restaurant for each of the people in the couple. Include anecdotes about fictitious popular restaurants in Brooklyn.

2. Create a blurb for the above article.

Learning/Exploring a summary of concepts for a new topic that I’m trying to process.

This one’s more conversational. For example, Mike’s learning about rugged individualism and collectivism, so he’s chatting with ChatGPT to see how theories he has about teamwork vs. individual desires are reflected in what has been written in those topics.

We're excited about our progress with AI, and know we have a lot more to learn. We hope by sharing our adventures, we inspire you to consider how AI can enhance your work without overshadowing the creativity and empathy that make your projects stand out.

Happy customer of the month

Impressed by @balsamiq, purchased it in 2011 and still using it 13 years later. They've upgraded versions since then, but still let me download v3 and use my old license. Thanks for not abandoning me 🫶 — narekk 🇺🇸🇦🇲

Product news

Have you ever added a Label control, started typing, and realized that you needed more than one line? Me too. Our product team showed me this neat trick recently: if you’re ever “stuck” with a one-line-of-text element, hit CTRL+ENTER to get a second line!

Balsamiq automatically transforms your label into a Text control. This even works if you select a Block of Text or Line of Text control and hit ENTER.

Company news

Our internal projects are still relatively quiet as we focus on product improvements and our brand refresh. The biggest ones right now are our group retreats, which is when specific teams get together. Our Apps, Editor, and UX teams have their in-person group retreats in Bologna next week!

Help us make Balsamiq Better! Our research team is currently looking into what does and doesn’t make our product delightful. We’d love to know your opinion.

That's it for this month!

We told you how we’re doing it, but how are you exploring AI in your work? Or how would you like to see it come to life in Balsamiq? We’d love to hear your stories and maybe share a tip or two. I read (and try to respond) to all your replies.

See you next month, with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq!

Arielle for the Balsamiq Team

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Balsamiq - How Balsamiq uses AI

Inside a founder’s chats

Leaving the tedious dev work to the bots

UX, Support, and Marketing: AI as an assistant

Happy customer of the month

Product news

Company news

That's it for this month!

Most new customers find Balsamiq via recommendation...

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