Cue and Butler

The Issue

In today's day and age everyone is so wrapped up in their Iphones, Facebook Statuses, and Instagram pictures that they're starting to lose personal interaction. People are so heavily focused on the "I", they are losing touch with the "we".

User Research

While our team was going though ideation, we realized that even though we were supposed to be in deep conversation about project proposals, all of us had our phones out- which we noticed was very representative of society. This observation lead us to conduct group interviews with friends and strangers about their use of electronics in social settings, send out surveys to fellow Cal students, and observe how people interacted with one another at coffee shops and restaurants. We found that people are interacting with one another less and less as they are increasingly absorbed in their own personal technological bubbles, and that even when people do talk they either don't know what to talk about, or spend all of their time with meaningless chit-chat.

Our team with our phones out while coming up with project ideas.

Sofia distracted by her phone.

Initial idea list of the things we could potentially do with/in a kitchen.

A Group Interview over dinner with some friends.

Meet Butler and Cue.

The kitchen is a place where family and friends get together to talk and catch up, and as such it is the perfect space for Butler and Cue. At the touch of a button Butler invites friends over for a nice cup of coffee or a pleasant meal. Letting you know in real time who responds and what they say though text to speech capabilities. Cue then locks everyone's phones away, and prompts meaningful conversation through an array of interesting questions.

Designing Butler.

Every design choice we made with Butler and Cue was intentional. To start with Butler, we wanted him to be simple and intuitive, and we wanted people to be able to interact with him as easily and quickly as possible- at the push of a button. Butler only has two buttons, one to invite friends over for food, and one for coffee. We used visual/icon signalers to reduce the cognitive load on users, allowing them to immediately see which button mapped to which function. We also designed Butler so that he was small enough to fit in the kitchen next to a coffee pot, in such a way that it was as convenient as possible for users to use him and invite friends over.

Butler and his minimalistic design.

Designing Cue.

When trying to find a solution in bringing people together for meaningful conversation, our research revealed we would need to address two issues. First, we would need people to focus on each other, and not on their phones. To tackle this, Cue has a compartment where people place their phones during conversation, and have them locked away until a predetermined time transpired. Our second issue was how to actual prompt "deep" conversation instead of idle small-talk. Well, Cue does this too by providing a "deep" question at the beginning of conversation, and whenever she senses a lull in conversation for more than a minute.