Testing Microinteractions
After we spent quite much time exploring various forms, finally we could make an agreement on the shape — the face of our AI, Aaina. It is composed of three layers; a white circular dotted outline, soft mixed colors inside, and the background.
The dotted line visualizes the voice of AI. Even though we finally converged into abstract and simple shape, we kept struggling to reflect humanistic behaviors. We thought the vocal visualizing effect could be the best way to represent the speaking gestures without a mouth. Also, we designed it to turn continuously when Aaina is activated, which could give a feeling of comfort and familiarity.
The soft mixed colors inside the dotted line represent gestures or emotions of Aaina. For the default state, it is composed of warm colors that match well with the personality of Aaina.
Lastly, the background is filled with dark blue colors. We thought the colors of the deep blue sea gives a feeling of calmness and caring.
Motion 01 — Activation
We tried to give a feeling of engagement for a client before and after a conversation. In order to induce interact with Aaina by touching the screen, we designed the activation stage like this — when a client touch the screen, the basic form of Aaina changes and it is filled with colors with water ripples, which represents Aaina is appeared and ready to talk.
Motion 02 — Color Movement
The inside colors subtly move continuously. We tried to visualize ‘liveness’, which might be the fundamental feature of a human. The irregular and consecutive movement make a client feel like talking with someone, not something. We tried to develop several versions of different colors that show the emotions(ex. support, sadness, or sympathy) of Aaina, but it was quite difficult to match other colors with the static bluish background colors. It will be developed further.
Motion 03 — Transition (Speaking to Listening)
In order to visualize humans’ typical behavior when they listen to someone, we spent quite a much time to observe and analyze the behaviors of others. The basic movement that we found was leaning backward and we tried to visualize this movement into our shape. By controlling scale, opacity, and blurriness, we could visualize the motion that we want. In general, we received positive reaction from this motion, however, we also got the feedback about changing those three at the same time gives too much contrast.
Motion 04 — Asking Questions
We realized that the sentences of clinician usually end with prompting intention — whether asking questions or indirectly induce to tell more. We tried to visualize the change of tone when Aaina asks a question to a client. It slightly gets bigger and than shift into shapes of listening state.
