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. Later we changed it to give users more freedom. The initial design was that once a Pokémon is asleep, users will not be able to wake them up. On the other hand, giving them some of their own habits sounded like an interesting idea to explore. 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. Should Pokémons have a life of their own?Īnother interesting UX dilemma was whether we allow use interaction with the Pokémons when they sleep. Pokémons are designed to start being sleepy at the dawn time (between 7PM and 9PM), and eventually start sleeping at 9PM. Even though the average bed time for Americans and the world is past 10:30PM, we wanted to encourage healthy sleep habits. ![]() By the time users open their phones in the morning, Pikachu will be awaken and greeting them. The decision was made to make to have Pokémons wake up at 6AM. I did some research, and discovered that the average wake-up time across the US and the world is between 6AM and 6:30AM. One of the UX challenges, therefore, was answering this question: What time should Pikachu wake-up and fall asleep? It was especially true for the creation and animation of the Pokémon characters consistency was the key.įive cutest Pokémons - Pikachu, Scorbunny, Grookey, Eevee, and Sobble - are designed to keep users company day and night. 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. I was in charge of the quality for these as well, and it was a huge responsibility. If something goes wrong with the SDK, it can potentially break all child products. 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. Android wallpapers are not meant to be running in Unity, which introduced levels of engineering complexity. To start, both the wallpaper and the app were made in Unity, which required out-of-the-box thinking and much patience. 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. ![]() 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.
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