What fiction can teach you about briefing AI

Suppose you ask AI to create a website for a small graphic design studio. The site should introduce its work and help prospective clients get in touch. The brief is simple: “Make it feel welcoming and professional.”

The result has generous spacing, warm colors, and friendly language. The work is presented clearly. There’s an obvious way to get in touch.

But you hesitate. Something is off.

It looks like a welcoming website, yet somehow the invitation feels unconvincing.

Perhaps another revision softens the language or changes the photographs. Each change seems reasonable. Still, you can keep adjusting the page without getting closer to the feeling you had in mind.

Eventually, explaining what’s missing becomes harder than asking for another version. The page keeps changing. The uncertainty stays.

Fiction offers a way to make that missing feeling concrete. A writer can lead you into an unfamiliar place and, through a few details, let you experience what it means to belong there.

Picture a scene in a story. Someone arrives at a dinner where they know almost no one. They pause in the doorway, unsure where to sit. A guest notices, pulls out a chair, and makes room beside them.

You can understand the relief without a description of how warm or welcoming the room looks. The writer has given you a small uncertainty, followed by an action that answers it.

The feeling has a context.

Now return to the design studio’s website. Imagine a prospective client opening it. They like the studio’s work, but they have never hired a designer. The “Get in touch” button is easy to find. What happens after clicking it is unclear.

Do they need a finished brief? Will they be expected to commit to a project? Could they simply ask a question?

For this visitor, a friendly appearance can coexist with uncertainty about taking the next step. That is one possible reason a page might look welcoming without feeling easy to approach.

Don Norman’s work on emotional design offers a useful foundation here. Appearance, the experience of use, and the meaning a person attaches to a product all contribute to how it is received. Those qualities can also conflict. A beautiful object can be frustrating to use.

On the studio’s website, a short explanation of what happens after an inquiry could give the visitor something the warmer colors cannot explain. If an initial conversation is genuinely available without a commitment, saying so may help. The information needs to match how the studio actually works.

That gives the next AI brief a clearer direction. Anton Sten describes how writing prompts can clarify an idea. In this example, the intended feeling becomes easier to explain once the visitor’s situation is clear:

The page is for someone considering hiring a designer for the first time. They like the work but don’t know what happens after an inquiry. Using the studio’s actual process, explain the first step and what they need to prepare. Keep the tone approachable and leave them room to decide whether to continue.

The next version can address a specific uncertainty. You can assess whether it explains the first step, whether the language is easy to understand, and whether its promises are accurate. Several visual approaches could support that same intention.

The lesson from fiction is the attention paid to the person inside the scene. You can practice it with a passage that affected you: notice what the character is experiencing and which detail changes the feeling. Then consider whether that observation has a useful connection to the experience you’re designing.

For a visual reference, the same question applies. Perhaps a page feels calm because information arrives at a manageable pace. Explaining that gives AI a more specific direction than asking it to reproduce the page’s mood. It also leaves room for different visual choices.

The explanation can stay simple. Ursula K. Le Guin observes in her advice on writing that ordinary language and familiar material can work remarkably well with care and skill. A clear description of someone’s situation can be enough to begin.

Ethan Mollick’s Good enough prompting adds a useful caution against making elaborate prompting a barrier to starting. Examples and feedback can help the direction emerge through use. Sometimes the first result is what allows you to see the missing context.

An intended feeling is still a hypothesis about another person. For the studio website, you could ask a prospective client to explore the page and describe what they expect after getting in touch. Their answer may confirm the explanation is clear, or reveal a different uncertainty.

That gives the next revision somewhere specific to go.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re working on something like this, email me.