Project 1

Explore the future of Bixby

My role

I teamed with two designers and a researcher for the initiative to explore how to better adapt the global product Bixby for Chinese people, from discovery to implementation.

What I did

- User interview
- Competitive Research
- Ideation
- Prototyping
- Workshop facilitation
- Internal & external coordination
- User Testing

Conduct desk research and generative user research to uncover opportunities

I conducted desk research and helped the researcher run user interviews and field studies to discover opportunities in AI assistants. we also talked with users from competitors, like Siri, Cortana, Duer that have a high volume in the Chinese market.

Share findings, extract key insights

Visual expression of emotion

We had 15% user utterances around chit-chat, not asking to complete a task or get a piece of information. People complained Bixby was stony and lack of real emotions. We knew the key of building a emotional connection between users and Bixby was emotional intelligence internalized in Bixby's responses. Besides proposing how BIxby should understand the users emotion behind the utterances and reply in a human way, which was a long-term investment, we also explored concepts on the visual side.

When asking users to pick what visual representation they would like for an AI assistant , the majority chose the cute human-like images. We prioritized two ideas that makes Bixby reply with emotion in a visual way. Idea 1 is to give Bixby its own visual embodiment, which has different expressions in different statuses like listening and loading. Idea 2 is like an Easter Egg experience, when users say specific things to Bixby, e.g. when the user say "I am sad", an animated gif show up, which can create a feeling of being cared.