Knowing how to work with Epiphany unlocks speed and quality gains. Five minutes with this guide will help make every design session more productive.

You and the agent, building the draft together

Epiphany has two panels: your working draft on the left, and the chat on the right. Think of the chat as an always-on design assistant: you ask it for opinions or changes, and it immediately applies them to your working draft. Using the chat well is key to getting the output you want, fast.

Think conversation, not prompt

With Epiphany, you don't need to worry about prompting the way you might with general-purpose tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot.

The instructional design logic is already built in: the workflow, the right questions to ask, a sound structure. You don't need to think of everything before you start. Get to a first draft quickly, then iterate using the chat.

You bring the context: the business problem, the audience, and the constraints. You also bring your designer point of view on what good looks like. The chat is where you put both to work.

Conversation starters

Here are some things you can try to develop a feel for what an effective Epiphany chat conversation looks like:

At the Brief Stage

• Ask for a summary of the source documents you uploaded. E.g. "Give me a bullet point summary of the source documents in non-technical language."
• Generate different versions of the brief for different stakeholders. E.g. "Rewrite this brief for a time-poor executive reader."

At the Outline Stage

• Ask for alternative instructional strategies. E.g. "Start every module with a mini-assessment." Or, "In Module X, add a video activity that pauses at decision points and asks learners to answer questions." Either way, Epiphany will propose changes you can review and implement in one click.
• Explore other structural choices. E.g. "How would this course look if we made it self-paced and cut the time in half?"
• Ask how-might-we questions. E.g. “How might we use things the learner can see or touch at their desk as prompts or anchors during this online course?” Read through what Epiphany recommends, then ask the chat to implement the suggestions you want to try.
• Ask Epiphany why it structured something a certain way, or how it arrived at a recommendation. This helps you decide whether you agree — and ask for an alternative approach if you don't.

At the Storyboard Stage

• Sharpen an activity. E.g. "Make the distractors in this quiz more challenging."