Kip’s design process to re-imagine AI persona
We started designing Kip’s AI persona with a very simple premise: No more butlers. Butlers were too formal, too cold and the weird obsequious “your wish is my command” was uncomfortable. Especially to a 20-something person who grew up believing in equality, freedom and things like that.
User-testing results backed our beliefs. People think they want a pure Alfred-like obedience, but in reality it’s a total user turn off.
As an AI shopping chatbot, Kip needed to be friendly and chatty, but not too much. Kip is supposed to help people save time and not be a nuisance. To be knowledgable, interested in products and passionate about helping people. In other words, the ideal salesperson.
We came up with 3 names, with catchphrases and actions the characters might have. What would they do, in x scenario? What would they say? Like good storytelling, it was ‘show, not tell’. This laid the groundwork of how to convey a personality without explicitly telling the user “Kip is x”.
Then we started sketching characters. We were thinking of our childhood in Singapore, and all the mascots we grew up with. It’s very different from America. In East and Southeast Asia, there’s a cultural expectation of good design to create adoption. Your design must speak to the teenage schoolgirl in the mall, but also the middle-aged career mom. Character goods like Hello Kitty (worth 5 billion) are extremely popular. You can’t design a technical consumer product and make it easier later. Accessibility comes first.
Accessibility was our top priority, and by going with an animal instead of humanoid we saved ourselves from problems of gender, race and other representation issues that limits adoption. In the end, we selected Mina the penguin, Toby the panda and B the bear as our prototypes.
We refined character features, starting with the face and did several other tests i.e. what if Toby was a bunny instead of a panda? What if Mina was a cat instead of penguin? We also did name-testing across all levels of English speakers. Mina was too difficult to pronounce, especially for non-English speakers. ‘B’ had bad connotations in Mandarin and Japanese. Toby was a good name, but was considered too old fashioned.
We decided to focus on and refine the penguin design, it was the best choice for us. The blue-white-black color scheme conveyed ‘technology’ and penguins were well received by users of all ages and genders. We added some touches like a tuft of hair, upturned beak and a hairclip to give a sense of individuality:
We chose the name ‘Kip’ and reflected it back in our company. ‘Kip’ was an old term for bindle, and British slang for ‘room’ or ‘carry-on’. It was simple to pronounce, punchy and light. Kip was going to be the virtual friend that users would always carry with them, ready to help.
In the next post, we’ll talk about our design process of creating a shopping interface on chat messaging platforms. Stay tuned!
Try Kip on Slack by tapping the button below or try the demo at kipthis.com/chat
Check out Part I: Designing AI Persona: Don’t let Hollywood dictate UX design.
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