Is a blank chat box enough?
Design it like this
Pair chat with examples, templates and structured controls instead of a lone empty prompt field.
What the research says
Non-experts struggled to write prompts: they over-generalized from one example and treated the model like a human. A bare text box puts the hard part on the user.
“Expectations stemming from human-to-human instructional experiences, and a tendency to overgeneralize, were barriers to effective prompt design.”
Zamfirescu-Pereira et al., 2023
Sources
- Why Johnny Can't Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts2023 · CHI 2023 · J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Richmond Y. Wong, Bjoern Hartmann, Qian Yang
“Expectations stemming from human-to-human instructional experiences, and a tendency to overgeneralize, were barriers to effective prompt design.”
Abstract