No long timelines or back-and-forth. Your site gets built and launched fast, so you start getting found online sooner.No long timelines or back-and-forth. Your site gets built and launched fast, so you start getting found online sooner.
This is where human animation and intervention played a critical role. While challenging, it was crucial because an overloaded character UI could turn users off and make navigating Eney difficult. To avoid this, the design team chose to create a select set of emotions and gestures for Eney to express, ensuring that its expressions conveyed useful information. For example, when working on a task, Eney’s figure resembles a loading icon. To do this, we worked to reduce Eney’s on-screen movement to make sure it wasn’t distracting or excessive.
After exploring a few different shapes and styles for Eney, we settled on a circular figure, as it felt the most approachable. It was simple and helped create the feeling of a calm, floating digital companion, rather than another rigid interface element on a user’s desktop. Eney’s minimal face design also plays an important role in connecting with the user. Its eyes are the main emotional connector — a key feature in showing emotions without being cartoonish.
The color choice for Eney was also important. Many AI assistants and companies use blue in their products, as it’s typically associated with intelligence. Blue is a great color, but we wanted Eney to stand out. We still wanted the color to be warm and inviting while slightly more visually stimulating, which led us to choose the color pink. Among dozens of other AI products that choose a more blue aesthetic, Eney was designed to catch a user’s eye and stand out in their mind (and on their screen).
All in all, we wanted to create a character that was present but not attention-seeking; a warm and supportive digital helper that enhances a user’s workflow rather than distracts from it. Eney’s character gives personality to otherwise invisible processes.
Artists In The AI Era #
While those who aren’t design professionals may assume there wasn’t much significance behind Eney’s character creation, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Like many other products, all these elements — style, design, emotion, size, name, and more — were intentionally chosen, not by machines but by humans.
Even though AI has streamlined many design processes, namely enabling faster design, there are still many things it can’t do well. Even when designing Eney, while technology supported the process, human designers controlled every step and decision.
