What is SudoSpace?
______
In 2016, SudoSpace was an exploratory avatar creation tool and animated messenger application that was built to help market MySudo, now a much more popular iOS application for protecting personal privacy. While the handy, MySudo lets you communicate privately via voice or text messaging in addition to other features, SudoSpace was originally crafted to help market the experience and make it more fun for 2 types of people:
Those who care strongly about protecting their private information and those who are not aware of privacy control solutions.
Why SudoSpace?
______
It can be quite difficult to fully express emotion and intent via text messaging. And there certainly aren't encrypted platforms on the market that let you do this well privately. Second, people are very comfortable spending money on virtual accessories for their avatars. They view them as extensions of their real selves or in this case, a pseudo self. At the time, companies like Red Bull and others were licensing their brand for use with digital avatars on some platforms. This market provides opportunity for an additional revenue stream that extends beyond just personal privacy. But would if you could have both? A digital extension of your self and anonymity from trackers, hackers and annoying people?
So SudoSpace was developed to explore the vitality of the relationship between privacy and digitally expressed emotion.
My Roll
______
I was brought on to Anonyome Labs as the lead designer for SudoSpace.
1. I worked with a team of 7 designers at Anonyome, but only myself and one other designer were devoted to this project.
2. I managed a business relationship with Tafi (maketafi.com), (then known as Morph3D). Through our collaboration, we crafted a prototype for SudoSpace.
3. I ran point on usability testing and competitive analysis.
4. I came up with the styling for the avatars based on avatar style research that I conducted prior.
5. I managed the project budget
6. I helped with wireframes and UI design
Style Survey
______
I grabbed tons of screen shots of existing artist creations from Behance and other areas of the web that the team and I liked, but also felt like could work with our current brand at the time. Here are a few of the samples I tested via UserTesting.com
Process
______
The process began with a lot of sketching after the results from the survey which proved that people in our target market gravitated toward big eyes, anthropomorphized animals, Disney-ish and comic book style characters. I sketched out many ideas which lead to more refined 2D assets which I later helped convert to 3D and then vetted 3D design studios for bulk production on our project. I continued to survey my own designs with our target audience as I moved along.
Style Rules and UI Progression
______
In an effort to further refine style, I created specific rules and was able to apply this system to all employees at Anonyome. Later I enlisted the help of Tafi to help further develop the style. Below is a sample of some of the rules, art and UI/UX work I created. Enjoy the progression...
3D Building
______
I built the initial models and rigged characters too. Later we handed off concepts to flesh out further customization.
Functionality
______
It was important that "Sudo" identity be able to be equipped with unique emails, phone numbers, title for usage purpose. A user could equip a custom avatar as Sudo banner to personalize it, but they could also use it in texting. For example, I could type ":hi" and my avatar would then appear as an animated gif, waving. The other purpose of the avatar was to help promote texting with Sudo.
The screens below showcase avatar selection and various screens for customizing eyebrows, eye shape, skin tone, etc.
Delivery
______
Ultimately, I lead and helped the team deliver a fully functional desktop version of the avatar builder because the cost and effort was much lower than doing it on mobile, but we took a mobile first approach and ensured that the avatars could look good as smaller graphics. That was a big reason I kept the eyes larger and head a bit larger.
I also helped deliver a private and secure social platform with the ability to be expressive with text-to-animation mapping using customized, full-body avatars. I worked with the talented Daniel Gileadi to bring this to life. Each world represents a topic and each tile is a subtopic of this "world." We were experimenting with different fun and unique ways to create social engagement and interaction with others securely and privately.
We Printed Trading Cards
______
We gave these out as gifts for an internal event. I designed over 90 unique cards.
