CLIENT: Google | ATAP

TIMELINE: August - December 2019

TEAM: Daniel Jeppsson, Morgan McCarty, Wayne Jackson, Alex Lee, Cassidy Curtis, Jason Leung

SERVICES: QA Lead, UX design

TOOLS: Unity

Case study

This is a collaborative project between Google ATAP and the Pokémon Company featuring Pokémon Sidekick live and interactive wallpaper, and Pokémon Wave Hello app. Offered for Google's Pixel 4, both products make use of Motion Sense technology (Soli), a revolutionary system with a miniature radar chip aimed to detect precise movements.

With a tiny talented team famous for the Emmy award-winning Google Spotlight Stories, I lead quality assurance project, helped out with UX, and provided constant feedback for the user interaction and visual design.

Project Management

A project with innovative deliverables, tight deadlines, multiple dependencies and several teams scattered around the globe, this was definitely a challenge, but a challenge in a good, fun way!

1. Innovative deliverables

Since the products introduced a new user interaction paradigm such as a touch-less use of smartphones, it was hard to uncover potential usability problems and do user testing before the release.

2. Technical challenges

To start, both the wallpaper and the app were made in Unity, which required out-of-the-box thinking and much patience. Android wallpapers are not meant to be running in Unity, which introduced levels of engineering complexity. Secondly, while the wallpaper shipped with the Android OS, the app also dependent on Soli technology, which in turn consisted of a headless app called Motion Sense Bridge and its backbone - an SDK. If something goes wrong with the SDK, it can potentially break all child products. I was in charge of the quality for these as well, and it was a huge responsibility.

3. Multiple stakeholders

It was a collaborative project with the Pokémon Company located far away in Japan, and we had to make sure that the products reflect not only Google vibe and style but also that of our partners. It was especially true for the creation and animation of the Pokémon characters; consistency was the key.

User Experience

Our team kept refining user experience throughout the project. The main user of the Pokémon Sidekick wallpaper is likely to be an owner of Pixel 4 who is in the late twenties or mid thirties, and is nostalgic about Pokémon.

Five cutest Pokémons - Pikachu, Scorbunny, Grookey, Eevee, and Sobble - are designed to keep users company day and night. One of the UX challenges, therefore, was answering this question:

What time should Pikachu wake-up and fall asleep?

I did some research, and discovered that the average wake-up time across the US and the world is between 6AM and 6:30AM. The decision was made to make to have Pokémons wake up at 6AM. By the time users open their phones in the morning, Pikachu will be awaken and greeting them. Even though the average bed time for Americans and the world is past 10:30PM, we wanted to encourage healthy sleep habits. Pokémons are designed to start being sleepy at the dawn time (between 7PM and 9PM), and eventually start sleeping at 9PM.

Should Pokémons have a life of their own?

Another interesting UX dilemma was whether we allow use interaction with the Pokémons when they sleep. The underlying question here was: how much freedom we give these characters? On the one hand, they live on our phones in a wallpaper and are dependent on our lifestyle. On the other hand, giving them some of their own habits sounded like an interesting idea to explore. The initial design was that once a Pokémon is asleep, users will not be able to wake them up. Later we changed it to give users more freedom. If a user wants to interact with the character while it’s sleeping, it will wake up and resume sleeping ten seconds in the absence of further interactions.

User Interaction

The main goal of the Pokémon Wave Hello app was to teach users how to use their new Pixel 4 with the new features made possible by Soli technology - swipe and reach. The app consists of five narratives for each character, where users are introduced to these gestures through play. That’s why one of the UI challenges for the app was making sure that users are not left on any screen with no tutorial instructions.

Do users know what gestures to use at any point?

It was one of the most important questions driving UI design. To make the Pokémon narrative flow more user-centered and seamless, we display tutorial instructions on each screen it so that users always know which gesture to use. In the flows where users have to reach three times (like on the video for Eevee below), we display instructions to the next round of iterations in the feedback to the previous round. If a user stays more than 5 seconds on the same screen without interacting, he or she will see the instructions again later. There is also a progress circle after each interaction so that users know if they are using Motion Sense correctly.

Project takeaways

Both products were released with Pixel 4 in mid October 2019 and received a very warm welcome across the world - USA, Japan, China, India, and Europe. SlashGear has a great video walkthrough the wallpaper if you want to learn more about the product. I’m honored to have worked on the project as I got to wear multiple hats and helped ship these amazing Pokémon pals!