The brief
This is a young blood brief from D&AD. The brief is for BBC and is called “Reimagine our relationship with the BBC using new and emerging technology”. The reason why I chose this brief is because I want to focus on user experience design in the future. This project interest me a lot since it’s also about human centred design.
Generating the idea
I decided to work on of the product BBC offers, the iPlayer. The iPlayer is a on-demand platform that provides subscribers of BBC to view its content anytime, anywhere. I used the power of mindmapping to try to find out how I would make the experience of using the iPlayer a bit better. First I mindmapped solely for the experience, to establish a direction I wanted to go in. Then I started to mindmap on the interface.
The name
I knew I was going to create a product, a personal one since it was going to be user centred. With Alexa, Siri and other AI products I knew a likeable, fluent and smooth name was needed.
First I started to brainstorm with different names. I looked at popular british names, british goddesses and also looked at some futuristic words. I even found a goddess name that is a popular Icelandic womans name, Edda. Most of these names were either not fluent or just plain frightening, which was not the way I wanted to go. The name needs to be likeable not scary.
After some brainstorming I came up with the name OMNI. The word in prefix means “all”. For example the word omnipotence means unlimited power. This I found to be a very suitable name for my product.
The problem is that the word is not beautiful, letter wise. So I came up with the hybrid of the word and changed it into OMNO, which has a geometric feel to it and similar shapes all the way through the name.
The concept
After creating the mindmap, explored with the the look and feel I wanted to establish the core concept of the idea.
The concept was to create a product that would enhance the TV viewing experience and make any TV a smartTV.
I created a a diagram showing the 3 main features of the product. Human Centred, Social Features and a viewing interface are all crucial features to create the good viewing experience OMNO offers.
Under those main features the functions are shown that unifiy them, which all lead to the product.
Exploring the product
I started off by sketching the actual product of this assessment. I knew I wanted to create a sphere remote that would roll to the user when called for. The product needed to be nice to hold and aethesticly beautiful.
The ball would be the remote and then I sketched how the reciever would look like, or the TV box.
The product logo
After I have established the name of the product I saw it pretty clearly on how the logo should look like. Simple and minimalistic. I started off by sketching various ideas but ended up by creating a simple logo using only the letters. I did not think using a logomark was relative in this case, also by looking at other similiar AI services, they only use lettermark.
The final logo represents optimism, future and personalised. It was designed to go in between of sophistication and friendliness.
The logo is simple so it can work in different environments such as print, material, 3D and screen. It has a unique form to it which stands out from other type only logo marks.
The interface
It is inevitable to create a on-demand video product without a interface you can view it in. Before creating the wireframes I created a user flow for the product.
Interface wireframes
After creating the user flow I see a clear path on how to structure the interface visually. I started by sketching the wireframes which were then digitalized.
The wireframes changed a bit in the progress, I added things that I did not notice were missing in the sketching period. They were added in the digital version.
The OMNO interface
The OMNO user interface shows TV content from BBC. It is where you can access all of BBC on-demand content.
In the interface you can easily browse between tv stations, suggestions and genres.
Smart remote
The smart remote is the core of the concept. It is build in with motion sensors which helps you to achieve complex gestures. It also comes with many other features such as voice control. With voice control you can call your remote and it rolls to you and tell it to go charge. So you can say good bye to loosing the remote.The material is also designed to be child proof and animal proof (up to a certain point).
The remote comes with a smart viewing box where you can control the OMNO interface.
The box
The smart view box is the other half of OMNO. It is also crucial to be able to use the OMNO interface. The box comes with many great features such as:
Voice control
You can use the voice control to navigate in the app, call for information or open upp settings or categories. The voice control is for power users, since not all prefer to use voice controls. This feature is also used to analyze if there is another person present, which helps to identify other profiles to compare content with.
Face recognition camera
The face recognition camera is used for 2 purposes, on one hand to identify who in the family is viewing and on the other hand is to identify if there are other OMNI owners present. With that feature OMNI can compare 2 or more algorithms and suggest content that is mutual to all people. For example when using this social viewing feature:
OMNI compares profiles and does not suggest content that the other person has seen.
OMNI compares mutual interests and suggests content related to that.
OMNI understands if you are with your spouse or your best friend and suggests relevant content to that. For example romantic movies with spouse and action movies with the friend (It depends on the algorithm, what you have been watching together in the past)
OMNI has a high tech algorithm and comes very close to suggesting right content
The product
The product works well together along with the interface
Marketing
In addition to the product I decided to create a simple advertising campaign, which would be portrayed as a teaser for the product. The ads would be displayed in subway underground, on street billboard and in various medias like TV, web and print.
The ad campaign refers in a fun way to the painting by Michelangelo called "The creation of Adam". The ideology is that the remote is controlled by gestures which requires hands. There is also a link between "create" and OMNO, which in a way the viewer is creating his ultimate viewing experience with the help of OMNO machine learning.
It also gives the dark texture a good contrast, has a bit of humour and is well noticeable.
Landing page
In addition to marketing materials I designed a landing page that would fit the brand and sell the products. The purpose of the landing page is to directly sell the product. It would be kind of a sub-page from BBC.
Thank you!
