Ally - Your Forever “Friend”

“User Experience Design and Evaluation” at KTH

The goal of this project was to address the challenges of sustainable data.
Ally - Your Forever “Friend” is a chatbot. The conversations start out being pleasant, but after a few days, Ally starts revealing information that she should not know. This will make the user become uncomfortable and over time the information she shares ramps up to the point where the user wants to delete the application. She will keep going further by reaching out in ways outside of the application, such as by email or by calling the user. Shortly afterward the experience ends and the user is prompted by a link to a website that features information about data awareness.

Process

In the ideation process to come up with this idea, we followed the double diamond principle. First, we conducted interviews to try to identify if people care about what is done with their data and how much they know about the data collection processes. Following the interviews, we found the main insights and created a persona that captured the main points. Then we moved on to brainstorming with that persona in mind and came up with various ideas on how to address this topic. We narrowed the ideas down to three main concepts that we further developed and got feedback on in order to decide on the best one. Ally - Your Forever “Friend” was the favored idea.

The design choice was friendly pastel colors to make the whole application appear welcoming. A friendly and pleasant voice and courteous manner make the chatbot likeable and create a bond between the user and Ally. Coffee table and plants to establish a comfortable atmosphere of being in a friend’s living room. Ally can interact with the decorations in her room and the decoration even changes over time to make her seem more like a real person and to create discussion points about what is changing.

At the end of the experience, the user goes to a website that features various pieces of information about what can be done with your data. For example what information is accessible with your advertising ID and how much data is collected about you. This data is presented with various examples to make the interaction engaging so that the user actually wants to read it.

Design & Development Process

This project involved a lot of teamwork. We made the solution with Figma where we created a style guide, animations, and an interactable high-fidelity prototype. The final deliverable of the project comprised a video demonstrating the app in a real-life setting, accompanied by a poster that we presented at KTH.

Other team members: Alexander Rothmaier and Kári Steinn Aðalsteinsson.