With the rise of bots, also arose an identity issue, at least for me. When designing an interaction with an AI what would be the right approach? Mimic a real person? Just use the product logo with a voice?
With the introduction of a bot in TOPDOX, I had to find an answer for this questions. The first option just doesn't feel natural to me and the other just seemed lazy (and could raise issues with the brand usage itself).
Personally, I have no problems with AI's as long as they are not designed to look and feel human, so I knew I needed a different approach. The design process started with this questions in mind and wide research of what was being done.
BB-TOP in TOPDOX for HipChat signin and onboarding processes.
In a very early stage, the product logo was used as a placeholder. We confirmed it was a lazy solution and it wore the brand down. Creating a character looked like the way to go. The first ideas were generated from the logo in a circle. There were some vectors going on, but I wasn't happy with the results. It was very stiff and very robot-like (I know... it's a bot, but still... I wanted something different).
So I started sketching on the iPad, creating a character with imperfect edges, with a human touch to it and inspirations from movies and video games (a droid that everyone was looking for and the friendly moogles from a famous game saga. Kupo!). BB-TOP was born of this process, a friendly bot, a bit quirky and with the dream of helping the users have a better day!
BB-TOP has different states to reflect the current context and help the user achieve his goals.
