MOTUS is an empathetic half chatbot and half virtual assistant that encourages self-care through games and achieving daily goals. MOTUS is a solo project from Designlab UX course.
MOTUS is a friendly companion chatbot. Using GPT-3 Language model, MOTUS understands emotion and can empathize with you. Like a virtual assistant, it helps you keep track of your daily schedule, and like your caring friend, it helps tend to your wellness by encourage you build good habits and work with you to create achievable wellness goals. You can grow your MOTUS by talking to it, interact with it, and by finishing your daily tasks.
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a pattern of daily social distancing worldwide, and many office jobs are now going remote. While we do not yet have the data to understand the long term psychological effect this pandemic has on our society, it is apparent that many people are experiencing loneliness as well as lack of motivation. MOTUS want to aid their users of daily loneliness and helps encourage motivation by accomplishing small daily goals and build confidence.
1. Loneliness - a silent epidemic.
2. Lots of AI chatbot and virtual assistant out there, but can they relate to you?
Through competitor research and physically testing out available products in a span of 3 days, I found that virtual assistants generally do not recognize a wide range. For example, most I was able to get out of Google assistant is being receptive of joy and being funny. With Siri, I was able to get basic advice when I told Siri "I am sad" but I was not able to have a sustain conversation with it.
I was able to test one chatbot product (Replika) that utilize the GPT-3 language model and felt that it understands wide range of emotion, from happiness to grieve, although still with restriction.
Even with restriction though, I was able to feel an emotion connection with my Replika after about 40 minutes of chat.
Here are some key takeaways I gathered from the initial user interview with 4 participants.
1. People want to feel like their assistant is helpful.
2. People want to feel safe and comfortable while talking to their chatbot.
3. People want to feel a sense of accomplishment.
Based on user interviews and market research, I use those findings to form 3 personas: Career focused bachelor, Homemaker, Single older individual.
GPT-3 is a language model AI created by OpenAI that can generate human-like text on demand. The model has 175 billion artificial neurons. Once fed proper data, it can produce convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence.
If you'd like to know more about GPT-3, here's a video by Two Minutes Paper explaining GPT-3 very well in only 7 minutes.
From researches above, I determined 3 broad design requirement for MOTUS:
1. Provide companionship
2. easy and fun to use
3. Encouraging people to take care of themselves in micro level but throughout the day
During 1-1 interviews, I mentioned Tamagotchi and got positive responses from all users. The responses were a mix of the feeling happy nostalgia, and the enjoyment of taking care of something. I use Tamagotchi as an interface reference for my idea sketch.
In general, MOTUS target audiences are drawn to nonthreatening appearance when it comes to a wellness based app. I thought then to create a gamified look and feel would add the most value the experience. I drew inspiration from games I used to play in the past: Tamagochi, Raknarok, Pokemon. Oh how I miss when things were more simple.
It is important to give users a companion they can bond with. Companion should have an appearance that is lighthearted will lighten up the mood.
TEXT CHAT, VOICE CHAT, AND AR INTERACTION WITH YOUR AVATAR.
Form a friendly and comforting connection with your avatar through 3 different channels of communication: talk, text, and play.
POINTS AND REWARD SYSTEM.
Collect points and grow your avatar through interacting with it, finishing daily tasks, and accomplishing your wellness goals.
Gamify of UI is to encourage a sense of childlike fun you had playing games growing up.
Like a game, you can change your avatar look, collect accessories, and develop traits.
FOCUS ON YOUR MENTAL WELLBEING.
MOTUS helps you create achievable wellness goals by analyzing the conversation you two have throughout the day, find pain point, and suggest activities, games, or tasks that will contribute to your wellness goals.
MOTUS also turns your daily conversation into a diary journal for you to look back to at any time.
SYNCED WITH YOUR PHONE CALENDER SO YOU CAN SEE THE BIG PICTURE.
Combine phone calendar with MOTUS wellness goal calendar to help you see through everything you need to do in a day. Calendar comes with a filter on 3 categories: Wellness goals, Event, and To do.
User testing conducted to 5 participants through a video chat. User was given link to Figma prototype and asked to perform 2 tasks. Participants were picked based on similarity to the 3 personas.
Here are key takeaways from user testing:
1. While 4 out of 5 users enjoy the color, some felt that app color theme should be customizable.
2. Avatar and the gamification style are well loved across the board from all participants.
3. Participants would like to see more interaction from the avatar and be able to talk to it at the homepage.
4. Some users didn't understand that the focus of this app is to encourage mental wellness.
5. Participants felt uneasy at the beginning and would like an onboarding tutorial.
6. Some participants are statistic driven and would like to see some data visualization of their wellness journey.
ADD VOICE CHAT BUTTON TO HOMEPAGE.
Create a direct pathway for users to easily interact with the avatar.
More priority revision include...
- Add 2 more color theme. Dark theme and monochrome theme.
- Wellness data visualization on homepage.
- Onboarding tutorial.
Overall, test participants react positively to the concept of Wellness focused companion AI, as well as the user interface throughout the app. What I wish I could have done differently though was to create a more responsive, animated, and detailed prototype, and to give my testing participants an opportunity to try out actual GPT-3 based chatbot so that they could really feel the empathy in the interaction. I believe that way, participants would have a better understand of MOTUS's ability as a companion AI and as a virtual assistant.
I believe there are space and demand for more companion AI products to help combat issues such as loneliness and depression. What I hope is that an empathy driven product such as MOTUS can help uplift the spirit of their users in their trying times, and leave a positive habit forming after a long period of use.
