Team

with Ekta Verma, Jisoo Shon, Shambhavi Deshpande

Role

Research, Concept Development, UI design, Video Editing

Project Duration

5 weeks

Tools

Adobe XD, After Effects, Photoshop, Google Dialogflow, Figma

Background

The use of AI continues to grow as it offers efficient solutions to problems facing people and businesses, as well as quick ways of accessing relevant information. In fact, research consultancy Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. Virtual assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Facebook Messenger’s M, can access and analyze users’ locations and online activities and they have become an important means for users to interact with other services and applications.

So the team had the task of designing a virtual assistant for a company that has not launched one.

We decided to create a virtual assistant for Fitbit.

Fitbit is an American company that produces activity trackers, wireless-enabled wearable technology devices that measure data such as the number of steps walked, heart rate, quality of sleep, steps climbed, and other personal metrics involved in fitness. We chose this company due to the strong relationship some of us had with the application and the brand strength it had, which helped us with the research to create a more accurate virtual assistant.

Outcome

BIT

BIT is the virtual assistant (VA) that we created for the fitness app called Fitbit. BIT is an active and playful companion that lives in the Fitbit app and wristband. It will assist you in tasks, celebrate achievements, gives you reminders about sleep, food, and exercise, and nudge you to maintain a pace during a workout based on your health statistics. BIT was made to improve your relationship with the Fitbit app based on its added value, which is a personal and friendly trainer to keep you healthy without being strict and costly.

HOW it works

BIT is part of a whole ecosystem of technologies, including the smartwatch, the smartphone and a smart TV. The tasks above are the things BIT can help with, and are based on the current Fitbit watch and Fitbit app functions. The main categories are exercise (first row), food (second row) and sleep (third row), all of this to have a holistic approach to fitness.

01

Exercise

CELEBRATE YOUR GOALS

The states of BIT can help you understand its actions, as shown above, listening state is the one where the circles outside are coming in, is as if the VA could absorb the audio you’re producing. Then the acknowledge state where it understands the command and then it gives you the output, this could be a specific screen like the miles you have walked so far or how much is left for your daily goal, and if you’ve reached it, the celebration state will come up, indicating that you have completed a daily achievement. The states of BIT are mostly for the Fitbit watch since it’s a screen that should not rely too much on text so, the animations are intuitive for the user to grasp the actions of the VA by just watching, instead of reading them.

TRACK YOUR EXERCISE

BIT exists also in the Fitbit app for the smartphone. Based on the current application, we modified the menu to fit the VA, in this case, just as Google Assistant, BIT is activated by clicking the circle in the middle, which is BIT’s “face”. Once clicked, a display will come up with a question:

Hi, how can I help you?

You can give instructions by voice or by typing a message, you can edit the message even after given the instruction. Once BIT has understood and loaded the task, it will give back an output with text and voice as shown in the video. Additionally, is color coded with the signature Fitbit blue, to help the you focus BIT’s answer.

There are pre-selected tasks, like log an exercise, log a food, or schedule an exercise. But basically, BIT can helps you understand the fitness statistics available in the app, such as steps, calories burned and distance walked, and tells you how much is needed for your daily goal to be completed when you ask for it as shown in the example on the right.

Have a personal trainer in your tv

BIT can also be part of your smart TV and can help you exercise at home. As shown in the video before, the instructions can be customized to the preferences of the user. Once the user is exercising, an algorithm can predict if the posture is correct based on the video input of the training and the camera available in the smartTV. BIT’s feedback is written and displayed with voice in case the user is not looking at the TV, making it almost like having a personal trainer at your home for free.

02

Food

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR CALORIE INTAKE

When logging the food items and calories in the Fitbit watch, you can have a summary of how many calories you had in total and how many are left or if they are over your daily goal. When over, the alert state will appear letting you know not to consume more calories for the day, based on the set objective. The alert and celebration states are accompanied with sound to have a second layer of awareness for the user about BIT’s actions.

03

Sleep

SLEEP REMINDERS AND ALARMS

Sleep is so important for fitness and health in general that BIT is also helpful during these tasks too. Just as setting an alarm or a sleep reminder can be tedious and people normally don’t set them up, but BIT by just letting it know with voice with an instruction, the alarm or sleep reminder is set up in only 3 seconds.

These interactions allow you to have an overall summary of your fitness statistics with just one instructions and to keep a log of your health through the Fitbit app and BIT, because these are the small changes that lead to big wins.

Design process

01

Understanding the Problem

When we were appointed to create a Virtual Assistant for a brand that did not have one, each of us explored different possibilities going from Netflix to McDonald’s, but all of this with the premise of having a very strong brand to begin with, which eliminated the many small companies and startups that could be interesting too. So we only stick to the big companies, then we did another elimination round, where we evaluated the functions of that particular company, which eliminated the enterprises that had more than one focus or had a limited one like Disney and Adobe.

Then we did a final round to explore the last options and the ones we were more familiar with, and the one that was common among my teammates was Fitbit, so we decided to go with it thanks to the familiarity that we had with its functions and the opportunities that a VA could offer to the brand.

Once we had the company selected, we did a brand exploration to adapt our Virtual Assistant design to it and be faithful to the style guidelines. Fitbit also has assets that are free and downloadable, making this task extremely easy.

During our research, we realized that Fitbit had release the new Versa 2 with Amazon Alexa integrated as a virtual assistant. We had this information after the selection of the brand, and we doubt about keeping the brand at all but the professors challenged us to make it different and fit our VA to the company’s functions and create new ones and not design a general VA as Amazon Alexa works. So we accepted the challenge and kept with Fitbit as our company, and decided to give our VA a role of a trainer not just an assistant.

MARKET RESEARCH

During the research for Virtual Assistants, we did competitive research and user research with a survey and an interview. The survey was part of our quantitative and qualitative data for the preferable fitness VA’s interactions from the users. The interview with the personal trainer was made to understand the language and priorities of a fitness instructor.

For competitive research, we started looking at other existent virtual assistants like Siri and Google Assistant. We analyzed the devices they lived in, like Apple Watch and iPhone for Siri and Android Phone and TV for Google. The reason of our study is because we wanted to expand the VA platform to bigger screens such as mobile, TV or smart mirrors as an option, apart from the Fitbit watch.

Additionally, we explored the motion states they had. For our surprise, we realized that they don’t have too many states present in these environments and the transitions between them are really fast and subtle.

Online survey

For our user research, we sent an online survey that got 55 responses and they were asked about interactions with a hypothetical fitness Virtual Assistant — we asked a general population, not only Fitbit users, so we could have a broader scope of insights.

We got the following responses.

After the survey, we had a better understanding of the nudges and the frequency in which our VA would appear on the mobile and the TV, and in what context.

In parallel, we were reviewing Value Sensitive Design for a Seminar I assignment, which helped us understand better the value tensions that our virtual assistant could have, and one of them was data privacy. The survey helped us confirm the importance that people place on this value and how careful we had to be while sharing the information with other users.

This was brought up when we were talking about the social aspect of our VA and how the sharing information would be an important feature that we have to put extra focus on. This resulted in a leaderboard that has anonymous participants unless people share their actual user information with the fitness class.

Trainer Interview

Finally, we interviewed Pattye Stragar, a personal fitness coach to get more insights into the interactions between the user and the VA as a trainer.

She mentioned that it is important to use motivational phrases and avoid saying “You’re doing it wrong”, as a professor in a classroom, we should not discourage people from doing the tasks. Additionally, she said that exercises could be adjusted by the mood of the trainee, that a fitness coach will always take in count the client’s feelings but still do their work.

So if a person says they’re not feeling in the mood of doing exercise, then I won’t be suggesting strengthening that day, maybe a little more of stretching and relaxation exercises, like yoga but they would be exercising still.

She mentioned that people should do exercises based on their own limitations and needs, just as a prescription of exercises, and that people should be accountable for their own fitness goals with reminders and goal achievements.

From this interview, we got a benchmark and a guideline for our script and the conversational interaction that the VA would have with the user. Each of these takeaways from the research was analyzed and implemented into the design of the assistant’s new platform interactions.

02

Concept Development

The research helped us to create the personas and potential users of BIT, in this case Fitbit clients. And so we created some slides explaining the attributes of our personas.

Once we had the research about trainers and the brand identity, we started with form exploration of our VA and names. For the name of our assistant we decided to go for BIT as it followed the following characteristics:

• Unique enough to stand out

• Easy to remember and pronounce

• One syllable word

• Gender neutral name

• Needs to fit in with the company’s brand

And for the form exploration, we started by understanding the different motions and states that BIT needed based on its functions. So we had an extensive discussion of all the states that we could explore, and at first we had 15 states, but we started to narrow down our options until we had 6 of them.

• Listening

• Acknowledge

• Speaking

• Celebration

• Alert

• Alarm

Once we had these locked as the basic motions, we started the shape exploration and color, which led to amazing experiments in After Effects, including Audio Spectrum and CC sphere.

After some feedback from our peers and professors, we decided to go with the circle as a 2D shape but with more motion and add other layers like sound and color to improve the user’s experience with BIT’s actions, so we made them really easy to understand. And so the final states were the following.

Listening, Speaking & Acknowledge

These three motions are considered as one set of interaction with users. We designed moving inward and outward small circles for the listening and speaking state. and acknowledgement was designed to show consent and confirm.

Alert & Alarm

With distinctive sounds, alert motion let users to know about their food consumption state. And alarm motion has powerful color spreading to take user’s attention.

Celebration

This motion appears when user accomplished their health goal. We try to express the feeling of achievement through their color and movement.

03

Design Decisions

First, we did an analysis of the platforms we wanted to explore since we had been asked to incorporate a new device for our VA. In this case, BIT lived first in the Fitbit watch, but then we transitioned to the smartphone and a smart TV exploring and explaining the functions of each category for each device in the table of “How it works” section.

Additionally, while exploring the different platforms, we found out that the Fitbit watch had a dark background with high contrasted colors for the interface and the Fitbit app in the smartphone was light mostly and had few screens that had a dark background such as the food log which had a graph but the rest of it was white in the background, so this made it a little bit hard for our professors to admit that it was a cohesive design among the devices, but we decided to be faithful to the current design instead of changing it. Although we probably would have changed the smartphone UI to a night mode in that case, because the watch needs to be dark for the convenience of the user.

Based on the research about brand identity and user experience in their smartphone application and smartwatch, we could define 3 keywords for the BIT’s characteristic.

Active — Since Fitbit encourages the user to reach their Health and Fitness goal, their overall mood was energetic and alive. From there, we selected Active as a keyword.

Companion — Its products are activity trackers such as various type of smartwatch. These wearable technology devices measure data such as the number of steps walked, heart rate, quality of sleep, steps, and other personal metrics involved in fitness. That information is transferred into a gentle nudge or alteration to interact with users. Through their workflow, we thought companions like BIT can give a more friendly feeling to users.

Playful — BIT is a personal trainer helping users through continuous fitness advice, a balanced diet, and sound sleep habit. This happens all over the day. Therefore, we thought the tone and attitude of BIT should be playful and give continuous motivation to users.

Finally, while creating the scenarios for our concept video, we had the prompt of integrating with other applications and we discussed about the possibilities based on BIT’s functions. From there we decided to incorporate the other apps with Uber eats and the calendar, but there were already a lot of options of integrations, like Google Maps and other VA’s like Google Assistant and Siri. Due to time constraints, we explored these options as part of our functions for food and exercise.

04

Prototyping

The prototyping of this particular project was easy at first since we had the Software Development Kit and Application Programming Interface assets from the Fitbit page, which gave us the exact UI rules and the only thing we had to do was to reproduce it. But that was only for the first part with the Fitbit watch, because the motions of BIT were shown in all the screen so there was no further integration with BIT and the current UI there. It was until the Smartphone UI that we started to have to think a little bit better about the UI design.