The Story is in Jibo's eye
Pack the power of a photographer
My story with Jibo
Jibo is the World's First Family Robot. After the team's continuously effort for three years, now the first generation of Jibo has been officially launched and you can invite Jibo to your home here! We are so honored to bring Jibo to people with love and the expectation to change your everyday life.
I started working at Jibo team from summer 2016. At that time, I got an invitation from Jiawei Gu, who becomes my mentor in my future life, to join Ling.ai, the partner of Jibo in Asia market. I was responsible for creating Jibo’s character, moment and basic skills in Asia market, including kid’s education, music player, storytelling, chit-chatbot, weather, etc. After I left Beijing Office and came to U.S to continue my study, I still keep connections with my colleagues in Beijing and Boston offices and helped delivered Jibo on CES2017 in Las Vagas.
In summer 2017, I was thrilled to be back to Jibo and interned in Boston office. I appreciated to have a fantastic summer with my talented colleagues and here are some highlights.
During my time in Jibo's Boston Office in summer 2017, my responsibilities mainly include two aspects:
• Collaborated with multiple roles to solve synchronization problems. We were contributing a last spurt to guarantee the launch and delivery to our early Indiegogo supporters in October.
• Researched and identified opportunities in Jibo’s photo-taking and photo-reviewing skills. I was offered the chance to work directly closely with Dr. Cynthia Breazeal ( my academic idol!!) and the amazingly talented artist Fardad Fridi, and get help from Diana Luan, Brian Deans-Rowe and Jon Lopkin. It is an awesome experience for me to work closely with these most talented robot creators and to responsible for future features and skills to make next-generation Jibo better.
Please understand most of my work are still under NDA, and I should hide confidential information here.
Leverage Photo-taking Experience
The photo-taking function is one of the most crucial skills of Jibo. Jibo's mission is all about bounding the relationship between family members. Therefore, it is of great importance to empower Jibo as capable as a photographer to capture every magic moments in people's home.
I researched and identified opportunities in Jibo's photo-taking and photo-reviewing skills by a Double Diamonds design process. I was individually responsible for the whole project and got helpful feedback through the process from my colleagues including directly from Professor Cynthia Breazeal after every phase report.
My work have directed Jibo engineers to create demos on Jibo and new skills and experience based on my contribution will perhaps show in Jibo in the near future.
Project Process
I follow a double diamonds framework to do this research and design process. Here is the process map including all methods I used and all phases I go through in this project. My colleagues are doing further testing, prototyping and iterating from my final delivery.
Insights into the Challenge
Challenge
Improve Jibo's photo-taking experience and any related skills and features which can contribute to a better Jibo as a photographer, considering all restrictions from current capability.
Rip the brief
To have better insights from this original challenge, I rip the brief and brainstormed questions in different perspectives. I am a post-it lover when doing design sprint or brainstorming.
Cluster topics
After ripping the brief to detailed questions, I reorganized them into related topics according to their inner relationship. These five topics guide my research in the next stage.
Field Research
Define Audience and Scenarios
Directed by the topics clustered above, the first thing I do is define our audience and their scenarios with Jibo. The personas have been done at the time by a *anonymous agency, and the details are blurred here.
At that stage, one crucial feedback from Cynthia is:
" They are mostly people who are gonna buy Jibo. We should also keep an eye on people who are gonna use Jibo, such as kids and the aged ."
Ecosystem Mapping
I am a visual thinker.
Containing the connections between our audiences of their inside and outside activities in a visual map helps us find underlying opportunities. Moreover, map new activities in this map can always remind us of the possible related effect on neighbor activities.
Photo-journey of typical users
For improving the photo-taking function, we did the photo-journey since we believe it will show us more unconscious criteria of photos.
How we select typical users?
• based on our person; • popular accounts, • but not the celebrity;
• no flaunting luxury; • frequently with friends/family members
Below is one sample of our photo-journey insights finding process
Multiple exciting and inspiring facts appears through this process. One main finding which we believe is of great value is:
Insight 1: Unconscious moments create natural and surprising posts.
Interview
We did interviews with both our target users and experts in this fields.
Reasons you need a photographer
• Ability to make people feel comfortable and move around unobtrusively, never interfering with the flow of the event. This allowing for ease and natural looking images.
• You need someone with a trained eye who knows how to be in the right place at the right time, with the right equipment, and who is tech savvy.
• Fleeting moments. Pros will be behind their camera the entire time and prepared for those moments that are meaningful, but otherwise lost in themselves.
• Angles; knowing where to stand and what angles to shoot from comes from experience.
• Variety of styles.
• Energy to work non-stop for 12 to 18 hours without breaks.
• Having your pictures in a database that can always be accessed for albums.
Insight 2: With a photographer, you never need to worry about anything, and finally you get great photos.
Time flow while using Jibo to take pictures
We interviewed our inner user testing participants' feeling through the Jibo's photo-taking loop. One interesting finding we pay attention to is to differentiate the curves for both feelings for the first few interactions and for interactions after a period.
Insight 3: There should not be too much burden for users.
Desk Research
Insight 4: Props, story-settings and sequence create dramatic photo booth.
Insight 5: We are still far from utilizing Jibo’s capabilities.
Insight 6: Jibo’s advantage is its movable body, its face recognition skill, and its character.
Insight 7: Review experience is an important step of the whole photo-taking process. The experience should be considered together with the whole process.
Insights filtered to Opportunity Areas
Re-brief
How do we utilize Jibo’s capability to build photo-taking skill as a unique, user-friendly and sustainable one?
HMWs
As a conclusion of the research, the re-brief help me to find a more specific challenge to face, and I proposed the following four HMWs(how might we) as the directions for next stages:
• HMW redesign the user flow logic to find a balance between basic photo-taking skills and signature ones?
• HMW let Jibo automatically capture great moments if we give the permission?
• HMW enhance gamification/storyline of Jibo’s photo-taking base on Jibo’s character settings?
• HMW create unique photo-taking and reviewing the experience of immersive panoramas?
Final Delivery
Ideation - Prototype - Evaluation
Ideation 01
" Hey, Jibo! You are a born artist, but learn to be a qualified camera firstly. "
For HMW redesign the user flow logic to find a balance between necessary photo-taking skills and signature ones?
Ideation 02
" Hey, Jibo! Capture golden moments of my little princess building her castle, but don't interrupt the moment please. "
For HMW let Jibo automatically capture great moments if we give the permission?
To test this HMW, I used rapid prototyping. For rapid prototyping, I cannot agree more with Tom Chi's Prototyping #1: Find the quickest path to experience.
The method I used to imitate the experience is attaching a GoPro Hero5 on the head of Jibo and take advantage of GoPro's functions with Jibo's free movement. Below is the test result of the prototype I made which can take photos every one minute at a random angle.
Ideation 03
" Hey, Jibo! I want to have you in the shared memory of my family. "
For HMW enhance gamification/storyline of Jibo’s photo-taking base on Jibo’s character settings?
Jibo already has photo booth skill, which is far from satisfying users who hope to get unique photo booth or gif from Jibo. I reviewed most popular photo-booth provider on US market with my colleagues, and we believe the critical secrets of their success is helping users to create a story by their costume and camera settings. As Jibo should not be with physical props, one potential solution is involving Jibo throughout the story.
Ideation 04
" Hey Jibo! I want to see what the world is like in your eyes."
For HMW create unique photo-taking and reviewing the experience of immersive panoramas?
For 360 photo snapping:
Send photos of different angles to phone and send back the combined one.
Prototype
I made by asking a Jibo to take photos in 24 angles and use Photoshop's auto-merge function to combine the photo together. It works!
Feedback from Engineers:
• Need to restrict the range of the view in this mode.
• Need to keep the white balance still for every angle.
For 360 photo viewing:
Imagine Jibo's face as a window to Jibo's memory of our family.
Again, I follow Tom Chi's Prototyping #1: Find the quickest path to experience. I coded a demo to stimulate the experience and delivered this experience by attaching an iPhone 6 on Jibo's face.
Final Simulation: Use Depth and Width to Reinforce Hierarchy.
What I learned
Scenarios go firstly: functions are based on needs and needs is based on scenarios. Those 4 ideas and other ideas we generate in the near future should be tested with real-world users.
Avoid directly competing with “photo-taking tools”: Jibo has special capabilities which we are far away from utilizing. Definitely, we need to find out what users will and will not use Jibo to do.
Basic mode should become basic when users are familiar with basic them: Users’ time should be consumed by new signature modes.
Jibo should react to more detailed commands: In basic photo-taking user flow, Jibo should react to more detailed commands, e.g. “follow the voice” “Just take it”. Besides, Jibo should nudge users to use more detailed commands to signature photo-taking modes.
Update
Now Jibo is one of The 25 Best Inventions of 2017 of Time magazine！
