Sammy

web design | mobile design | experience design

Designed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sammy is a chatbot that takes users on guided, prompt-based walks. The goal of the chatbot is to encourage the user to experience their surrounding environment, whether urban or rural, in new ways.

Timeline

Spring 2020

My Role

Group project completed with Tiam Schraper and Kayla Montes de Oca

My Role: coding the Twilio chatbot

The Concept

Crafting unique experiences

The project aims to design an immersive experience that motivates users to let go of their old habits, enabling them to embark on an unplanned journey through a captivating landscape. During this adventure, they would abandon their everyday routines and surrender to the allure of the terrain, embracing the unexpected encounters they encounter along the way.

The Challenge

designing the prompts and learning code

There were two components to the project: designing in the prompts and building the chatbot. The key challenge for the first task was to create prompts that could be applicable in any environment and for users of any kind of physical ability. For this reason, the prompts are very simple to the extent that they can be interpreted in several different ways. 

The challenge of building the Twilio chatbot was mastering a JavaScript-based software, learning how to write functions in JavaScript code that would call actions from the chatbot, and integrating the Twilio flow with a functional phone number.

Lessons Learned

collaboration and looking forward

The Sammy chatbot is a great example of encouraging users to be adventurous and active. It is an experience design that can be used in lots of different environments and by all sorts of different people. If this project were to be taken further, it would be great to see it integrated with some aspects of audio narration. Another way to build further upon this experience design would be to make it more like a narrative game, and to make it more goal-based, with milestones integrated into the arc of the experience. 

This project was completed during COVID, which made me and my team members have to be especially intentional about the way that we collaborate. We had to divide up tasks and communicate constantly in order to make sure that we reached the project goals we had laid out for ourselves.