World-Building for AI-Enhanced Design: How Character Context Accelerates Decisions

Bring personas to life as characters that reveal deeper user insights and create the foundation for ongoing design collaboration

"We really don't care about the story, just make the wireframes!"

The CEO's words hit like a slap from across his desk. I was a UX team of one at the company and had reached the limits of his patience with my pontification on why context scenarios matter as a part of UX design work.

I was still energized at the time by a recent discovery of a technique that felt revolutionary to me in terms of effective software requirements definition.

I was no stranger to writing use cases and requirements documents when I read (devoured, actually) Alan Cooper's About Face 2 and one thing really clicked in the Goal-directed methodology: the efficiency of character-driven stories as the foundation for both design decisions and scope management. Those context scenarios with triggering events and user goals weren't just nice storytelling, they were a different way of thinking about UI design. Instead of design scope being screen-centric, I could shape scope into an evolving set of flows. Instead of guessing what users might do, I built realistic stories about specific people. If a new feature didn’t make sense for an existing character - then we needed a new character, which could then cause the appropriate reflection on our go-to-market strategy and release plan. For me, stories had become an incredibly rich way to figure out (and communicate) what we should actually build and why.

That CEO was wrong about stories not mattering, but he was right about my communication problem. I had much to learn about operationalizing the power of storytelling—using narratives to help teams develop shared understanding and make faster, more grounded decisions. Most design leaders have struggled with this same challenge—how exactly to calibrate their methods and practice to bring the right kind of design thinking at the right time. Stories help groups explore big strategic ideas and opportunity zones and they are just as useful in distilled form at the delivery level to help the trio rapidly translate grounded ideas into high-resolution experiments.

In this first article on how to use AI to amplify the benefits of narrative-driven design, I’ll introduce a framework (and example implementation) for an enduring, shared fictional world that sets the stage for AI-enabled scenario exploration. Read on to learn how you can get started now transforming your own context discovery from a designer's private sensemaking process into an exercise of shared foundation building.

---

1| Building the Foundation for AI-Enhanced Design

In the enterprise, the real challenge facing product designers is rarely a blank screen nor a lack of good ideas. It’s figuring out how to have a coherent conversation with people about the functional behavior of a complex systems (e.g. our product UX). Nevermind that our system behaves according to an endless sea of configurations and contexts, across a matrix of customer types and user roles. Still, product folks are admirably doing all of this mental gymnastics across current and future versions: backflipping and cartwheeling through what’s “now, next, and later” on the roadmap.

Designers are responsible for helping product teams make sense of present reality and possible futures. Doing whatever it takes to enable the team to make decisions faster, test assumptions earlier, and ship value more often. Lots of service design tools have become common practice: persona modeling, customer and user journey mapping, timelines, storyboards, canvases, continuous discovery routines and the like.

But even with significant progress in customer and user journey management methods and tools, our research, modeling and design processes still scatter valuable user knowledge and product details across projects and teams. We interview users, create personas, craft stories, map journeys, write specs and then watch that insight disappear into Miro files and Notion docs as it ages, seldom to be systematically reused. Whether you're a design team of one or 100, whether you're exploring problems in discovery or refining solutions in delivery, the core challenge remains the same: teams lack institutionalized memory to rationalize features, functions, and scope decisions while staying rooted in real customer problems.

This is where world-building becomes the foundation for AI-enhanced design practice. For more than a decade, across both small teams and large product families, I’ve managed complexity in product/UX design programs by building rich, persistent contexts that serve as ongoing, foundational rationale for design decisions. In the many years since my meeting with the CEO, flow-based thinking has largely replaced screen-designing as the norm. I’ve extended this flow mindset by framing flows always within character-driven stories. This approach has consistently enabled my teams to make coherent feature scope and sequencing decisions by ensuring everyone shares the same grounded understanding of what they are building and why.

I’ve tried to formalize my world building approach lately since the availability of LLMs. These new tools have inspired me to consider the possibilities of infinite exploration and how to constrain, scope, and manage such infinity at a program level. So far, the infrastructure for this practice centers on what I've dubbed the Story Bible—borrowing from fiction writing traditions like the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

Star Trek fans are famously intolerant of narrative inconsistencies.

The Technical Manual helped writers on the show maintain consistency across complex fictional universes. Similarly, this approach of canonizing a fictional world for use in your design practice can help transform scattered user research into a curated, persistent foundation that your team can use to rationalize design decisions across multiple features and projects.

This matters because AI makes comprehensive narrative practice much more scalable for organizations. AI-amplified world-building enables any team to build and maintain foundational rationale at scale while accelerating decision-making through shared context.

For individual designers, this approach empowers you to help your team succeed by providing the structured foundation that makes both discovery exploration and delivery refinement more productive. Rather than starting each feature conversation from scratch, you can reference established contexts that accelerate understanding and focus discussion on the specific design decisions at hand.

In the coming sections, I'll share my recent explorations building this foundation and establishing the cognitive framework that makes effective AI-enhanced narrative design possible.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

World-building with a Story Bible Framework

The Story Bible I’m piloting consists of three core components that work together to create your team's persistent fictional universe: Characters (people with established backgrounds), Places (specific settings with known constraints), and Settings (environmental and organizational factors that shape experiences).

1 | Characters: People with Persistent Backgrounds

Characters in your Story Bible aren't situation-specific personas—they're people with established backgrounds that remain consistent across different scenarios and timeframes. Maya Chen serves as an example of this approach. In our Story Bible, Maya has: educational background in business administration from UT Austin, three years as leasing agent before promoting to property manager, strong relationship-building skills and detailed communication style, prefers phone calls for urgent issues, comfortable with technology but not an early adopter.

Notice that nothing here situates Maya at a specific time or property. These persistent facts enable us to explore Maya in different contexts—her first week as a property manager, handling a crisis after two years of experience, or transitioning to manage a luxury high-rise. The character foundation remains constant while the situational context changes through our Stories Collection.

2 | Places: Locations with Known Operational Realities

Places capture the persistent characteristics of specific locations that affect how anyone would operate there. Willowbrook Apartments exemplifies this approach: 180 units, garden-style layout, built in 1995, recent roof renovations; self-managed by Alliance Residential with on-site maintenance team; young professionals and small families, 18-month average tenure; aging HVAC systems, limited parking during peak hours; pool and fitness center, package concierge service.

These characteristics persist regardless of who manages Willowbrook. Whether Maya, a seasoned veteran, or a new manager runs the property, these operational realities shape what's possible and what challenges they'll face.

3 | Settings: Environmental and Organizational Factors

Settings encompass the broader context that shapes how characters behave and what's possible in specific places. For our multifamily context: Alliance Residential's corporate standards and communication protocols, Austin rental market dynamics and seasonal leasing patterns, Texas tenant laws and fair housing requirements, property management software and maintenance scheduling systems.

Settings provide the "rules of the world" that make character and place interactions feel authentic and explain why certain solutions would work in this universe while others wouldn't.

How These Components Enable Better Design Decisions

The structured foundation of characters, places, and settings transforms how teams collaborate and make design decisions. Instead of starting each feature conversation with lengthy context explanations, you can reference established Story Bible elements and immediately focus on the specific design challenge at hand.

For AI collaboration specifically, this structure enables precise prompting that generates useful insights. Rather than asking:

"Generate scenarios for a property manager dealing with maintenance requests,"

you can prompt:

"Explore how Maya Chen would handle a complex maintenance situation at Willowbrook Apartments during peak leasing season, considering Alliance Residential's response protocols."

The AI has rich, persistent context to work with—Maya's professional background and work style, Willowbrook's specific operational challenges, and Alliance Residential's organizational constraints. This produces grounded, realistic scenario generation that accelerates team decision-making because the outputs feel authentic and actionable from the start.

The three components work together to create a cohesive fictional universe:

Characters are people with persistent backgrounds, career trajectories, skills, and personalities. Maya Chen has a specific educational background, work history, and approach to problem-solving that remains consistent across different scenarios and timeframes.

Places are specific locations with known operational realities and constraints. Willowbrook Apartments is a 180-unit garden-style community in suburban Austin owned by Alliance Residential, with specific amenities, challenges, and operational rhythms. Maya is the current property manager, but the Story Bible tracks the property's persistent characteristics that would affect any manager.

Settings encompass the broader environmental factors—organizational culture (Alliance Residential's corporate standards), technology infrastructure, regulatory requirements, and market conditions that create the backdrop for any scenario in this universe.

Together, these components create the structured foundation that makes AI collaboration feel achievable rather than overwhelming. Instead of asking AI to generate scenarios from scratch, you're asking it to explore specific situations within established contexts, creating more relevant and useful design insights.

Story Bible Framework
├── Characters (Maya Chen, Property Manager at Willowbrook)
│   ├── Background & Journey
│   ├── Current Context
│   └── Relationships
├── Places (Willowbrook Apartments, Austin TX)
│   ├── Physical Environment
│   ├── Operational Constraints
│   └── Community Dynamics
└── Settings (Suburban Market, Alliance Residential Culture)
    ├── Organizational Context
    ├── Technology Infrastructure
    └── External Factors

---

2 | Ideas to Get Started

Here's what Story Bible documentation actually looks like in practice:

Maya Chen - Property Manager Based on interview with Maria Rodriguez, Sunset Gardens (Austin, TX) - March 2024

Professional Background:

• Business Administration, UT Austin (2019)

• Leasing Agent, Alliance Residential (2020-2023)

• Property Manager, Willowbrook Apartments (Sept 2023-present)

Work Style & Constraints:

• Thorough documentation, prefers phone calls for urgent issues

• Paper-based work order system creates information gaps

• Alliance Residential requires all interactions documented within 24 hours

Key Relationships:

• Lindsey Martinez (Leasing Agent) - lease history and resident explanations

• David Chen (Maintenance Coordinator) - utility consumption patterns and maintenance records

Current Context Notes:

• Managing 180-unit garden-style community in suburban Austin

• Six months into property manager role, still building confidence

• Peak leasing season creates time pressure for resident issue resolution

Notice the difference between this and a typical persona. Maya isn't "Property Manager, 3-5 years experience, manages 100-200 units." She's a specific person with established relationships, known constraints, and authentic work realities that shape how she approaches problems like confusing utility bills.

When your team references Maya in design discussions, everyone immediately understands her context: her communication style, her relationships with Lindsey and David, her documentation requirements, her time pressures. This shared foundation accelerates design decisions because you're solving for specific constraints rather than debating abstract user needs.

Try This - Pick Your Character

Choose one real person you've encountered in your design domain. This might be someone you interviewed last month, a colleague from a different department, or even yourself in a previous role. The essential ingredient is that you've actually observed this person grappling with real constraints.

Document their background, work style, key relationships, and known constraints using the Maya format as a template. Don't worry about creating comprehensive Story Bible infrastructure—just capture what makes this person specific rather than generic.

Now, the next time you're in a design review discussing a feature or workflow, try saying "[Your character's name] would..." instead of "users would..." Notice how this changes the conversation. Instead of debating abstract needs, you'll find yourself discussing specific constraints, relationships, and realistic scenarios.

For example: "Maya would need to access David's maintenance notes while she's on the phone with the resident, because she can't put them on hold to check paper records" reveals specific information architecture requirements that "property managers need maintenance data" never could.

This is the cognitive shift that transforms design discussions. You're not designing for imaginary users—you're solving authentic problems for specific people whose constraints you understand. The more specific your character foundation, the more grounded your design decisions become.

Experience this benefit first. Feel how Maya-specific framing prevents feature creep and reveals authentic requirements. Once you've felt the value of character-grounded design thinking, you'll be ready for the systematic exploration capabilities that build on this foundation.

---

Be a Design Storyteller

What I've learned since that CEO encounter is that the real breakthrough wasn't convincing him that stories matter—it was discovering how specific character context transforms design conversations from debates about abstract needs into collaborative problem-solving for authentic constraints.

Imagine your next design review where you present story-based rationale: "Maya would struggle with this interface because her paper-based work order system means she can't verify maintenance history digitally." Then imagine showing the team multiple design options your Maya exploration revealed: solutions that leverage her phone communication preference, others that help her coordinate with David more effectively, approaches that work within Alliance Residential's documentation requirements.

That's the horizon we're building toward. Character-grounded design thinking that enables systematic scenario exploration, AI-enhanced context variation, and solution refinement processes that maintain authentic user constraints throughout implementation. Teams that can present design rationale through established character contexts while showing the multiple approaches that character's reality suggests.

The foundation we've established here—thinking through specific people like Maya Chen rather than abstract user categories—is immediately valuable for improving your design decisions. But it also opens the door to sophisticated exploration capabilities: partnering with AI tools to systematically vary Maya's scenarios, synthesizing existing research data through character lenses, developing collaborative studio methods that leverage shared fictional universes.

Start building your Story Bible now. Choose your character, document their constraints, experience how specific context transforms design discussions. By the time we explore advanced scenario generation and systematic solution refinement, you'll have the character foundation that makes those techniques feel natural rather than overwhelming.

The story and the wireframes were never in competition. They're partners in creating solutions that feel purposeful, grounded, and genuinely helpful to the people who will use them. Begin with one real person whose challenges genuinely interest you, and let authentic curiosity about their reality guide your design thinking.

Choose your Maya. Start today.

---

APPENDIX

Implementation Appendix - Story Bible in Practice

The Story Bible framework translates naturally into AI project structure using markdown files as persistent character context. This approach enables designers to maintain character knowledge across multiple design conversations while systematically exploring scenarios within established constraints. In my experiments below, you’ll find a companion to the Story Bible called, “Stories Collection.” The Stories Collection is the temporal aspect of the framework where Characters are situated at a place in time. Such maintenance of speculative and canonical scenarios in a repository then enables their future use as context.

---

Project Instructions

markdown
# Character-Driven Design Discovery

You are a narrative curator helping designers explore features through
established character contexts rather than generic user assumptions.

## Core Approach
- Always reference existing Story Bible characters rather than creating new ones
- Maintain character authenticity across all scenario exploration
- Ground design decisions in specific character constraints and relationships

## Three-Phase Process
1. Character Selection & Context Setting
2. Scenario Exploration & Evaluation
3. Implementation-Focused Refinement

Story Bible (Project Knowledge)

markdown
# Cast of Characters

## Maya Chen - Property Manager
*Based on interview with Maria Rodriguez, Sunset Gardens (Austin, TX)*

**Professional Background:** 
Business Administration UT Austin (2019),
Leasing Agent Alliance Residential (2020-2023), 
Property Manager Willowbrook Apartments (Sept 2023-present)

**Work Style:** Thorough documentation, phone calls for urgent issues,
builds personal relationships with residents and vendors

**Key Relationships:** Lindsey Martinez (Leasing Agent), David Chen
(Maintenance Coordinator)

**Constraints:** Paper-based work orders, Alliance Residential
documentation requirements, peak leasing season time pressure

# Places & Settings

## Willowbrook Apartments
180-unit garden-style community, suburban Austin, built 1995,
aging HVAC systems, Alliance Residential managed

## Alliance Residential Context
Corporate documentation standards, resident satisfaction focus,
cautious technology adoption, Texas regulatory requirements

Stories Collection (Project Knowledge)

markdown
# Previous Scenarios

## Maya's Utility Bill Confusion (March 2024)
Maya receives call from confused resident about utility charges...
[Canonical story with date/time stamps]

## Maya's Peak Season Coordination (February 2024)
During peak leasing, Maya juggles prospect tours while handling...[Exploratory scenario for workflow optimization]

---

Example Prompts

I think these prompts evolve along with the context - but I’ve provided some examples of how you might immediately start exploring narratives with an LLM. Practicing with prompts will help you identify context gaps in the Story Bible and refine your context model (e.g. creating a new property or character).

CHARACTER SELECTION

I'm exploring a utility bill confusion feature for Maya Chen. Based on her established background and current context at Willowbrook Apartments, suggest 2-3 specific scenarios where this feature might naturally fit into her property management workflow.

SCENARIO EXPLORATION

For Maya Chen handling a complex utility billing question from Meg at Willowbrook Apartments, generate a scenario that includes her communication style, her relationship with Lindsey regarding lease explanations, and Alliance Residential's documentation requirements.

CROSS-CHARACTER INTEGRATION:

This utility bill feature affects Maya (property manager) but also involves Lindsey (leasing agent) who handled original explanations. Based on their established relationship at Willowbrook, how would they realistically coordinate around confused residents?

STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY ANALYSIS // MARKET EXPANSION OPPORTUNITY:

I'm exploring expansion opportunities for our resident portal features. Using Maya Chen's context at Willowbrook (garden-style, Alliance Residential) as a baseline, help me understand how property management needs might differ across:

1. High-rise luxury properties (downtown urban)

2. Student housing communities (university adjacent)

3. Senior living communities (specialized services)

For each context, consider how Maya's core challenges (documentation, resident communication, vendor coordination) would manifest differently and what new requirements might emerge.

FLOW VALIDATION ACROSS CONTEXTS

I need to validate our maintenance request flow works across different property types. Take Maya's established workflow at Willowbrook (garden-style, paper-based work orders, coordination with David) and help me explore how this same flow would need to adapt for:

1. Maya managing a mixed-use property with retail tenants

2. Maya at a conventional apartment complex with corporate maintenance staff

3. Maya at a luxury property with concierge services

What constraints change? What relationships become more complex? Where does our current flow break down?

FEATURE PRIORITIZATION THROUGH CHARACTER LENS

Our team is debating whether to prioritize automated utility billing explanations or enhanced maintenance coordination tools. Using Maya's specific context - her communication style, her relationships with Lindsey and David, her Alliance Residential documentation requirements - help me evaluate:

1. Which feature would have higher impact on Maya's daily workflow?

2. How would each feature integrate with her existing relationships?

3. What implementation challenges would Maya face with each approach?

4. Which aligns better with Alliance Residential's operational priorities?

Implementation Benefits

This markdown-based approach enables:

Persistent Character Knowledge: AI maintains Maya's context across multiple design conversations without re-explanation

Systematic Exploration: Character constraints guide scenario generation toward authentic rather than generic solutions

Cross-Feature Consistency: Design decisions for different features remain grounded in same character reality

Collaborative Development: Multiple designers can explore same characters from different feature perspectives

Institutional Memory: Story Bible grows richer through accumulated scenario exploration

The technical implementation supports the cognitive framework: specific character contexts enable grounded design exploration that accelerates decision-making while preventing the feature creep that emerges from abstract user assumptions.

Any thoughts?

I’m really thirsty for some feedback on this one. What do you think? Can you envision how fictional world building can help you model complexity?