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Project context | Process | Solution | Reflection

I am one of the founding members of Siblings, a design collective dedicated to solving unique problems with design strategy.

We challenged ourselves to think about some of the crutches we used as designers. We decided to build an app by removing one of the most glaring crutches used in interface design—the visual interface itself.

A mobile game with nothing to download

Emoji Salad is an SMS-based chatbot game that allows you and your friends to play a Pictionary-style game using emoji. Emojibot, a chatbot with personality, facilitates the whole game. There's nothing to download—the app is used through SMS text messaging, using a group text thread.

Our goal was to build a game with nothing for players to learn. With no buttons or visuals to guide players, we ensure that users can navigate the game using a bot as a mediator and host.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Before writing any code, we wanted to test our idea to get a feeling for the game and see how people would engage with the bot.

I gathered friends in a regular iMessage thread and "played the role" of Emojibot in the conversation for a time. I would facilitate the game just like we hoped the bot would and react to users' messages. This rapid prototyping and improvisation gave us a feel of the user flows and the expected (and unexpected) cases we would need to design for.

In social psychology, this is called 'paving the cowpath '—looking at where the paths are already formed by behavior and then formalizing them.

Using this "fake it 'til you make it "experience, we learned how players interact with Emojibot and create a more human experience by anticipating players' reactions.

Personality by design

The team wanted to get a good sense of who Emojibot could be to different types of players. We set to work on understanding how personality can be categorized so that we could tailor the experience to our users for specific positive experiences.

We created a series of "personality scales." We wrote down a selection of celebrities or fictional characters with unique or strong personalities. We then made a few scales, like Enthusiastic vs. Understated, Silly vs. Dry, or my favorite, Level-of-shit-togetherness.

Caring about the personality of Emojibot helps users engage and connect to our game much more deeply than the standard messaging we started off with.

We presented our work at Emojicon, the first annual conference dedicated to all things emoji.

We continued to build out the game, get it in the hands of people worldwide, and had over 300 games going with players actively guessing and creating stories through emoji.

Experimentation, prototyping, and rapid iteration were critical components of this project. One thing I learned and keep coming back to upon reflection on this project is that the first idea is only sometimes the best or the one worth pursuing. Ideas are tools to get insight; the insight and product are precious, not the idea. This principle led us to a product we were proud of and game customers loved.

Product design goes beyond the interface and clickable elements on the screen—design methodologies can be applied to anything from complex trading systems to chatbots.