Visualising Aimee

Position

I was asked by stakeholders to explore what BT’s chatbot, Aimee, might look like. I began by collating examples of existing chatbots and tried to identify options to explore from ‘something familiar’ to ‘not seen before’. I began by visualising her as an animated character with actions, emotions and a personality. In the world of chatbots, this approach would be unique where typical interactions are often little more than an exchange of typed messages. In this example, it would be much easier to convey intelligence and BT’s brand personality through her appearance, tone, actions etc.

Result: Concept 1.0 was considered forward-thinking, distinctive and fun. Ideal for a day-two release—but they wanted more.

In this version, I tried something far less organic looking. I combined an animated reactive ‘graphical brain’ with a ’bot body’, based on EE’s logo

Result: Concept 2.0 was seen as future-facing and was preferred over a human-like representation.

Result: Concept 3.0 was liked by some but, it was felt that its graphical approach might cause users to feel Aimee would be lacking in an understanding or appreciation of human nature/emotion and therefore wouldn’t understand users/be friendly.

Taking inspiration from her name, I wanted to explore an option that was gender and anatomically-representative, to see how far I could go before this version of Aimee felt too artificial.