4-Part UX design prompts for every design stage

Summary

In this guide, you will learn:

• Using strategically crafted AI prompts to streamline and accelerate the entire UX design workflow, from research to handoff.

• Applying the "Role, Task, Context, Format" framework to generate specific outputs for key UX tasks like creating personas, journey maps, and test scripts.

• Integrating AI into a visual workspace to leverage the context of research boards and diagrams for more relevant results and better team collaboration.

Drowning in scattered research notes while your stakeholders ask for "quick insights"? Wrestling with blank pages when you need fresh design ideas fast?

You're not alone. Modern UX designers face an impossible balancing act—delivering thorough, user-centered design while meeting aggressive timelines. Traditional workflows often leave you juggling fragmented tools, struggling to synthesize complex information, and starting from scratch on every project.

Here's the thing: AI tools can be game-changers for UX work, but only if you know how to prompt them effectively. Generic requests get generic results. But structured, strategic prompts? They transform AI from a basic helper into a specialized design partner that actually understands your process.

This is where a structured approach to AI collaboration becomes invaluable. By building prompts around four key pillars—Role, Task, Context, and Format—you can get targeted, actionable results that actually fit your workflow. Even better, when you combine this framework with Miro's AI-powered visual canvas, you can move seamlessly from AI-generated insights to collaborative design work in one unified workspace.

Let's walk through the entire UX design process and show you exactly how to prompt AI effectively at every stage—plus how Miro AI can accelerate each phase of your work.

1. Research & Discovery: Building your foundation

Your research phase sets the tone for everything that follows. Smart prompting here can help you prepare better interviews, ask the right stakeholder questions, and spot competitive insights you might miss on your own.

Conducting user research

When you're planning user interviews, AI can help you craft questions that dig deeper than surface-level preferences. Here's how to prompt for interview scripts that actually uncover insights:

Prompt: "Role: Act as a senior UX researcher. Task: Generate a user interview script to uncover deep insights. Context: The script is for a new mobile banking app targeting millennials (25-35). The goal is to understand their current financial habits, frustrations with existing apps, and attitudes toward saving. Format: Structure the output with a friendly introduction, 5 warm-up questions, 10 deep-dive questions, and 3 wrap-up questions."

You can both generate your interview script and continue the work on the same board. Share it with your team, get feedback, and create a centralized research board. Miro AI can help you synthesize patterns from your interview notes later—just upload your research data and ask it to identify key themes or generate user insight summaries.

Stakeholder alignment

Nothing derails a project faster than misaligned expectations. Use AI to ensure you're asking stakeholders the right questions upfront:

Prompt: "Role: You are a design lead preparing for a project kickoff. Task: Create a list of key questions for the stakeholder interview. Context: The project is a redesign of an e-commerce checkout process. We need to define business goals, success metrics (e.g., conversion rate, cart abandonment), known technical constraints, and market positioning. Format: Organize the questions into three sections: 'Business Goals,' 'Technical Constraints,' and 'User & Market'."

Pro tip: Turn these stakeholder conversations into a shared Miro board where everyone can see priorities, constraints, and success metrics in one place. This visual alignment prevents those dreaded "wait, that's not what we agreed on" moments later.

Competitive analysis

AI excels at helping you structure competitive research and spot patterns you might overlook:

Prompt: "Role: You are a market research analyst specializing in user experience. Task: Perform a competitive analysis of Duolingo, Babbel, and Memrise. Context: Focus specifically on their user onboarding flow, core learning mechanics, and the clarity of their value proposition for new users. Format: Present the findings in a markdown table with columns for 'Competitor,' 'Onboarding Strength,' 'Learning Loop Weakness,' and 'Key Differentiator'."

Here's where Miro AI really shines—once you have this competitive data, you can ask Miro AI to help you spot opportunities and generate strategy recommendations based on the gaps you've identified. It's like having a research assistant that connects the dots between your findings and actionable design directions.

2. Synthesize & define: Making sense of the noise

Raw research data means nothing until you transform it into clear, actionable insights. This is where many UX projects stall—you have tons of information but struggle to see the forest for the trees.

Creating user personas

Turn scattered research notes into focused personas that actually guide design decisions:

Prompt: "Role: Act as a UX strategist. Task: Synthesize the provided research notes into a detailed user persona. Context: The notes are: 'Users are busy parents, they plan family meals weekly, struggle to find kid-friendly recipes, and value quick grocery list creation.' Format: Create a persona named 'The Weekly Planner' that includes a bio, 3 key goals, 3 major frustrations, and a short personal quote."

You can start drafting your personas using Miro AI persona generator and share it with your entire team so they can reference it throughout the project. Miro AI can help you refine these personas by analyzing additional research data or suggesting persona variations based on different user segments.

Mapping user journeys

Transform user goals into detailed journey maps that reveal opportunities and pain points:

Prompt: "Role: You are an experience designer. Task: Outline the key stages and details of a user journey map. Context: The persona is 'Finance Manager Felipe,' and his goal is to find and cancel an unwanted subscription using our new banking app. The journey should cover his initial frustration with the charge to his final feeling of relief. Format: Create a bulleted list for each phase (Awareness, Consideration, Action, Resolution), detailing the User Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings for each."

In Miro, you can visualize this journey map using one of our templates and use AI to identify specific moments where users might need additional support or where you can reduce friction.

Defining problem statements

Convert user frustrations into actionable design challenges:

Prompt: "Role: You are a design thinking facilitator. Task: Reframe a user problem into a set of optimistic, solution-oriented questions. Context: The core user problem is: 'Users get overwhelmed by the number of choices on the restaurant delivery app and often give up.' Format: Generate 5 unique 'How Might We' statements based on this problem."

These "How Might We" statements become the foundation for your ideation sessions. Add them to a Miro board and use Miro AI to help generate initial solution concepts for each statement—giving your team a head start on brainstorming.

3. Ideate & design: From concepts to solutions

With clear problems defined, it's time to generate solutions. AI can help you think beyond obvious approaches and consider innovative alternatives you might not explore on your own.

Brainstorming solutions

Break out of conventional thinking patterns with AI-assisted ideation:

Prompt: "Role: Act as an innovation consultant. Task: Generate a wide range of feature ideas. Context: The brainstorming is based on the 'How Might We' statement: 'HMW make tracking personal spending feel effortless and rewarding?' Format: Provide a list of 15 ideas, categorized under the headings 'Conventional Features,' 'Gamification Ideas,' and 'Forward-Thinking Concepts'."

Use Miro AI mind map generator or Sticky Notes powered with AI to generate these ideas, and start collaborating with your team right away. Use dot voting, affinity mapping, and discussion threads to refine concepts together. Miro AI can also help you evaluate ideas by analyzing which concepts align best with your user research or suggesting ways to combine different approaches.

Creating user flows & sitemaps

Structure your ideas into logical navigation and task flows:

Prompt: "Role: You are an Information Architect. Task: Create a logical, text-based sitemap. Context: The sitemap is for a new guided meditation app. It needs to be simple for new users but provide depth for experienced ones. Format: Use a nested bulleted list to show the hierarchy of the primary sections (Home, Discover, Library, Profile) and their key sub-pages."

Transform these text-based sitemaps into visual diagrams in Miro. Our diagramming capabilities make it easy to show relationships between pages.

Sketching & wireframing

Even before you open your design tool, AI can help you think through layout and component decisions:

Prompt: "Role: You are a UI designer describing a layout to a junior designer. Task: Describe the key components and layout for a wireframe. Context: The screen is the main 'recipe search results' page for a cooking app. It needs to display results clearly and provide easy-to-use filtering options. Format: Write a clear, descriptive paragraph detailing the header, filter bar (with specific filter examples), the grid layout for recipe cards, and the content on each card (image, name, cook time, rating)."

Use this detailed description as the foundation, combined with Miro's AI Prototyping tool, to get a first draft in seconds. The infinite canvas lets you explore multiple layout variations side by side, and you can use Miro AI to generate additional layout suggestions or refine your component descriptions.

4. Test & validate: Proving your designs work

Great design isn't about what you think works—it's about what actually works for users. AI can help you plan more effective tests and make sense of the feedback you receive.

Conducting usability testing

Structure your testing sessions to gather actionable insights:

Prompt: "Role: Act as a usability testing moderator. Task: Write a complete usability test script. Context: We are testing a high-fidelity prototype of a new flight booking website. The test should evaluate the end-to-end booking process. Format: Structure the script with four sections: 'Welcome & Introduction,' 'Pre-Test Questions,' 'User Tasks' (include 3 specific tasks), and 'Post-Test Debrief'."

Document your testing sessions in Miro where you can create dedicated boards for each test, capture video walkthroughs, and organize feedback by theme. This centralized approach makes it easier for your entire team to understand user pain points.

Analyzing feedback

Transform raw user feedback into clear, actionable insights:

Prompt: "Role: You are a qualitative data analyst. Task: Analyze the following user feedback and identify key themes. Context: The feedback is from five users who tested a new project management tool. [Insert raw, anonymized user quotes and notes here]. Format: Summarize the findings into a bulleted list with the 'Top 3 Usability Issues' and 'Top 2 Positive Highlights,' including direct quotes to support each point."

This is where Miro AI becomes particularly powerful. Upload your raw feedback data and ask Miro AI to identify patterns, prioritize issues by severity, or suggest specific design improvements based on user comments.

Iterating on designs

Convert feedback into concrete design improvements:

Prompt: "Role: Act as a senior product designer. Task: Propose concrete design improvements based on user feedback. Context: A key piece of feedback from usability testing was: 'I didn't realize I had to add my credit card before I could start the free trial, which felt deceptive.' Format: Suggest three distinct solutions to address this trust issue, explaining the pros and cons of each."

Use Miro to create quick iteration sketches and compare different approaches visually. Your team can provide input through comments and reactions, making the iteration process truly collaborative.

5. Handoff & collaborate: Bringing designs to life

The best designs mean nothing if they can't be implemented effectively. Clear communication with developers and stakeholders is crucial for maintaining design integrity.

Collaborating with developers

Translate your designs into development-friendly documentation:

Prompt: "Role: You are a UX designer writing documentation for the engineering team. Task: Translate a design feature into agile user stories. Context: The feature is a new 'create a custom pizza' flow on a food delivery website. Format: Write three user stories using the standard format: 'As a [user type], I want to [action], so that [benefit].' Include acceptance criteria for each story."

Miro's collaborative features let you create shared boards where designers and developers can work together on specifications, ask questions through comments, and maintain alignment throughout implementation.

Creating design specifications

Ensure consistent implementation with clear microcopy and interaction guidelines:

Prompt: "Role: You are a UX writer. Task: Write all the necessary microcopy for a specific user interface component. Context: The component is a 'file upload' modal window. It needs to be clear, concise, and reassuring for the user. Format: Provide text for four states: 'Default,' 'Uploading,' 'Success,' and 'Error (File Too Large)'."

Document these specifications in Miro where they're easily accessible to your entire team. Miro AI can help you maintain consistency by reviewing your microcopy and suggesting improvements or alternatives.

Post-launch analysis

Learn from real-world usage to improve future designs:

Prompt: "Role: You are a data-informed product designer. Task: Formulate hypotheses and suggest experiments based on post-launch data. Context: Analytics show a 50% user drop-off on our app's payment screen. User feedback suggests a lack of perceived security. Format: Propose two data-driven hypotheses for the drop-off and suggest a specific A/B test for each hypothesis to validate it."

Use Miro to document these hypotheses and create experiment plans that your team can reference and update as you gather more data.

Making AI work for your UX process

The prompts above will help you get better results from any AI tool, but here's where Miro's innovation workspace really accelerates your workflow. Instead of jumping between AI tools, research documents, design software, and collaboration platforms, you can do it all in one place.

Miro AI understands the context of your boards, so it can help you synthesize research findings directly from your user interview notes, generate design ideas based on your findings, and even suggest improvements to your launch plan. This contextual awareness means less time explaining background information and more time getting useful output. See a few examples in the video below:

Plus, because everything lives on Miro's infinite canvas, your entire team—designers, researchers, product managers, and developers—can collaborate in real-time or asynchronously. No more version control headaches or lost insights buried in email threads.

Ready to see how AI can accelerate your UX process? Start with a free Miro account and explore how our AI-powered visual canvas can help you move from research insights to validated designs faster than ever.

Author: Miro Team Last update: August 29, 2025