Case Study

Octane.ai

Build your audience on Facebook Messenger.

The Project

In the Fall of 2016, I had the opportunity to work with Matt Schlicht, Ben Parr, and Leif K-Brooks to help create their first version of a chatbot builder. Their platform allows content creators to build their own chatbots and interact with their millions of fans. The chatbots integrate directly with a wide range of applications, such as Facebook.

My Role

The product design team consisted of me, Alex Cagwin (lead product designer), and Danielle Hadley (UX designer). As lead visual designer, I establish a brand identity and design system that coalesced with their interaction and product design. Our collective end goal was to create an experience that's simple, and empowers anyone with any skill level to create their own chatbot.

Deliverables

• Branding: Guidelines, logo, illustrations, iconography, colors, typography etc.

• Comprehensive design system and style guide for development

• Full responsive, high-fidelity prototypes for desktop, tablet, and mobile web apps

• Marketing Materials: Marketing website, business cards, letterhead, t-shrits, plushy, stickers

Design System

A bright and colorful palette, friendly type, and playful illustrations help create an inviting athmosphere.
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Octie the mascot creates brand recognization, and a visual memorable token that helps break through a very saturated startup market. The Octie illustrations help guide the user through a process that may seem initimidating to the average user. Think: a cooler, smarter, cuter version of Clippy.

The Product

Publishers can can choose from 6 types of chatbots, each with a particular focus. Each type of chatbot has a similar step-by-step flow, starting with choosing a chatbot, and ending with the final details. We modeled this flow after an airline or e-commerce checkout so that it would be familar and understandable for the user.

Marketing

Alex and I designed a responsive marketing sight for the web-app, including product information, pricing tiers, team page, and a contact page. I designed the website while Alex did development.

Additionally, I worked with Ben Parr to create marketing materials, such as business cards, letter heads, a marketing deck, stickers, t-shirts, and even an Octie plushy.

Results

10M

fans interacting with Octane AI Chatbots

3Min

average time to set up a chatbot

Octane AI had a successful beta launch and quickly raised a series A round. Some of their beta users included: 50 Cent, Aerosmith, Kiss, 30 Seconds to Mars, SPiN and Magic Mike Live.

Press

“Their business is like web design platforms Wix or Weebly, but for chatbots. It’s a paint-by-numbers for bot creation that’s so easy, I could do it.”

-Katie Roof — TechCrunch

“Octane AI is a platform that enables businesses to set up powerful chatbots on Facebook Messenger in just a few minutes.”

-Tech.Co

“Octane keeps that promise of five minutes or less.”

-VentureBeat

“I built a chatbot. It can only do a handful of things, and it’s even dumber than the average chatbot. But it works, and I can talk to it through Facebook Messenger. More importantly, I’m not a coder.”

-Ellen Huet — Bloomberg