MassMutual Chatbot Redesign: From Human Characters to a New Approach
A few years ago I had the opportunity to work on a project with Mass Mutual. They working on looking to add a chatbot to their website and contracted my company to come up with the illustration.
After we met with them and got a rough idea of what they were looking for I got out my sketchpad and started sketching out characters. Instead of the more popular robot look and feel that is popular with most companies, they wanted their bot to be a human. There was a lot of discussion on what this human would need to look like such as race, age, gender, glasses, and no glasses. I went over all of my notes from the previous meetings and just started to draw. I came up with a dozen or so that was eventually reduced to six that my creative director felt were the strongest.
Once the initial sketches were presented to Mass Mutual they settled on a couple they liked and I proceeded to the next step which was converting them to vectors using their branded color palette. Their primary color palette is a handful of different shades of blue and white. As I worked out each illustration I realized how difficult it was going to be to keep the detail they requested for each character. When scaled down, almost all of the detail was lost or difficult to see. I presented the illustrations below to show what I was talking about. After a few days, they decided that the human route was not the way to go.
After ditching the human chatbot idea, I was given free rein to come up with as many ideas as I wanted in any direction I wanted. The only request was that the bot looked friendly and was branded in its color palette. I spent a lot of time researching other companies and what they were doing with their chatbots. I went back to the drawing board and just started playing with shapes and colors. The first set I came up with below was well received. I incorporated talk bubbles, wifi signals, and even the Mass Mutuals tertiary logo of five stacked dots. While I was having a blast coming up with new characters I realized I was running into the same problem as I did with the first batch. Too much detail. So I reworked what I had to come up with some more simplistic illustrations that would still read at a small scale.
Once I scaled back my illustrations that's when things started to fall into place. I focused on just shape and color. Once I did that it became a lot easier to come up with simple illustrations that would read well at any scale. I played a lot with positive and negative space. Which colors helped to give the bot more dimension, life, and personality.
After many hours of working on this bot, three were chosen as finalists. I made some adjustments and additions that were requested by the client for one final round and they would choose one from there.
MassMutual's Simplified Chatbot Design: A Perfect Blend of Creativity and Usability
The final bot was one of my favorites and was also one of the simplest. The bot used an upside-down speech bubble for its head with part of it looking somewhat like an antenna. They liked the idea of of incorporating the Wi-Fi symbol and the eyes were a nod to their tertiary logo. The bot read well on all devices and the client was very happy with the final product and so was I. It was a great learning experience as far as combining creativity with readability and usability. Sometimes the simplest things are the best answer.
