Screen location allows for maximum discretion
Information flows towards the user via bone conduction
Receiving information from the environment
Locked screen
In the past few decades the business world is becoming more and more globalizes and businesspeople deal with other countries and other cultures on a daily basis. But culture clash might interfere and prevent them from closing the deal.
Echo is a culture gap solution which will help you respect the culture of your colleagues. It listens to a conversation and offers real time local information. The user can read or listen to the information via bone conduction.
Using simple geometric shapes, I chose to display the action echo is preforming in an abstract way. The thought process of the interface design was “where does the information flow?” the motion on the screen and the color of the dots varies as ECHO listens to me, listens the environment, translates the language or translates the culture.
Technologies in use are NLP, voice recognition, AI and machine learning.
ECHO’s design aims for businesspeople. The offset of the screen makes it more discrete and differentiates it from common smartwatches. The strap closes using an inner magnet and can easily be changed. More customization, as well as pickup of information, can be done through the phone app.
While designing the persona of ECHO I thought of how it fits into the user’s life, who this device is for them. I defined the relevant spectrum between assistant and colleague, and located the ECHO persona closer to colleague. The ECHO persona is a reliable colleague, a professional and a friend who is on your corner and helps you with your professional goals. Some criteria can be adjusted by the user, like the persona’s gender, degree of intervention, calendar relevance and so forth.
Throughout the process I examined different interactions suiting a variety of use cases, as well as different objects that are complementary to those interactions.
The decision to move forward with the watch-like configuration was made with the target audience in mind, along with the understanding that we are currently in an intermediate period in regard to human-computer interaction, and doing something too unfamiliar will push the users away.
