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DeepSeek: when UI doesn’t matter

Localisation, prompting and a cute little whale.

Rosie Hoggmascall
UX Collective
9 min readJan 31, 2025

deepseek logo whale with wave underneath and claude, gemini and chatgpt logos in the water

A few weeks back I wrote about genAI tools — Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude — comparing their UI, UX and time to magic moment.

I made one big error: I didn’t include the underdog.

DeepSeek 🐳

It’s been in the news a lot. If you’re not up-to-date, watch this great 3-min video on YouTube which explains what went down.

In a nutshell, Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek has shown that quality outputs don’t have to cost the earth. It was trained in around 55 days at a cost of US$6 million, which is roughly 10 times less than the others.

And, it’s free.

As a result, the US stock market has taken a hit and the AI bubble has been rattled by the question: what if we don’t need to spend so much to produce good stuff with AI?

What I’m curious about is whether this underdog can match the bigger players in terms of user experience.

It has shown that it can on quality of certain outputs and costs to develop / run, now I’m wondering:

  • How does the UI compare?
  • Is it as easy to use?
  • Is there anything it does better / worse? Why?

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Written by Rosie Hoggmascall

I write a weekly newsletter on UX, monetisation, product-led growth | Sign up @ growthdives.com

Responses (14)

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Interesting✨

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Brilliant and engaging analysis of DeepSeek's user experience! Your thorough comparison of its UI against established players like ChatGPT offers fascinating insights. I especially appreciate how you balanced criticism (that "1998 landing page" quip…

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Apart from the obvious benefit of Chain of Thought to the LLM itself, CoT even helped me gain an understanding of how can I think better about the problem itself. It educated me in real time about all the parameters needed to solve a particular…

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