Evaluating ChatGPT: Generative AI in UX Design and Web Development Pedagogy

Abstract

The advent of widely-accessible generative AI tools and their rapid adoption across industry and education is necessitating large-scale revisions to user experience design and web development pedagogies and curricula, a process that will take some time. This report describes a series of initial experiments using generative AI tools as a student or junior designer or web developer might, sometimes naïvely and sometimes in more sophisticated ways, to complete beginner-level and advanced projects. The report evaluates how ChatGPT performs across three categories of prompts (brainstorming, design, and coding) and assesses the quality of the outputs in order to inform the research design of a larger, ongoing interdisciplinary study in its initial phases and to document the results for instructors or senior members of design and development teams to aid them in assessing the fitness of generative AI for user experience design and web development production.