Nemo the talking fish

Nemo is a product that provides a brand-new and adorable interactive experience with your pet fish 🐟.

With an iPad on the back of the fish tank and a camera on top, you could ‘talk’ to the fish and it could also ‘reply’ to you with a conversation bubble on screen moving alongside.

🕒 3 months, 2017-2018
👥 Lead designer (w/ 3 other team members)
🏷️ Interactive device, Voice interfaces

NEMO TALKING FISH 🐟

A lot of people like talking to their pets, it's relaxing and interesting.

But they can't reply. What if enabling our pets to talk with us?

It'll be interesting if we use NLP to simulate a pet - e.g. a fish talking to people.

We could put an iPad 🖥 behind a fish tank and display a dialogue bubble 💬 moving along with the pet fish.
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With voice interaction, your fish can easily 'talk' with you!

Users and Scenarios

Based on the design prompt as well as our ideation, we started to explore on the suitable users and scenarios for this 'talking fish' product.

👫 Families with children

This group of people is fond of spending times with family members, especially some parent-child time
. They need fun stuff to do together.

🙇🏻 People living alone

This group of people is sometimes faced with some psychology problems. They need emotional company and prefer easy-raising pets.

Product Strategy

So, based on the users' need, we tried to design for the voice interaction in different scenarios - and also finish the whole product strategy.

💭 A fun chat friend

A product that chats with people about interesting and funny topics to bond family members, especially for children.

☂️ Reminder and helper for people's life

Help users to have a more delightful experience in their daily routines and pet-raising experience.

🤞 Mental health carer

Help users to have a more delightful experience in their daily routines and pet-raising experience.

Voice interactions

Then we designed for the key dialogues and interaction modules for the product. Also, I considered some edge cases in the flow.

NEMO TALKING FISH 🐟

Again, Why Nemo 🐟 ?

After we finished the MVP design of voice interaction, we dig deeper into the markets and seek for the uniqueness 💠 of our product comparing to the competitors such as Alexa or Siri.

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing the competitors’ features of Nemo, we ask ourselves why people should choose Nemo.

The fundamental attractions of our product are interesting experience to feed a fish at home as well as warm company that you could talk with.

But are these enough?

🐶 Pets

🎧 Alexa / HomePod

🐟 Nemo

Regular conversation

√

Voice reply

√

Help w/ daily life

√

Visual feedback

√

Mental health care

√

Listen to confiding

√

Family share

√

Portable

√

Design Iteration

With feedback from users and we found that:
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📹 Utilizing RealSense™️ and iPad, just ‘talking’ does not release the potential of it.
😒 People probably feel bored to talk with it after getting familiar with it cause it could not enhance the real communication among people.

So, we did a design iteration focusing on enhancing the family communication.

What if...we could play games 🎮 with fish in families？

Role-play games with fish

We utilized depth cameras 📹 to create a new and interesting interaction for Nemo.

An interesting game which enable the child and other family members to finish vivid stories 🪅 with Nemo together is a good way for them to establish a closer relationship.

Click the fish tanks to explore ↓

Stand in front of the fish tank and a creature 🐙 will appear on the screen to represent you.
Nemo will take you to a fancy journey...

The scripts 📜 will appear on the screen, you need to read them to continue the story.
The scenes will change as the story goes.

As the story goes, more characters 🦈 might join in so that more family members could have fun together with the fish!

How Nemo 🐟 ?

We created a demo of our product.
During the process, we were faced with several challenges, so we still iterated a lot and tried our best to achieve functions and enhance user experience.

💬 How to display dialogue bubbles?

We made some attempts to create a visual effect that fish’s conversation bubbles could ‘float’ above it like they just bubble some words out.

👀 Naked eye 3D imaging

❌ Water will disturb the reflection of light, also fish will have little space to live.

🔘 Hemisphere fish tank
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❌ Works only from several angles, also the light reflection on sphere would disturb the imaging processing.

↓

Faced with these difficulties, we did some design trade-off. We selected a flat and thin fish tank.
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Bubbles 🌫 on screen could just 'float' with fish and it appears that the fish is talking like in some cartoons.

NEMO TALKING FISH 🐟

FRRRREDERIC LIU