Nemies

Categories: Logo and Brand, UI and UX

Skills Used: UI Design, Interaction Design, Logo Design, Icon Design, Contractor Management

Company: BioSpeech
Project: Nemies
Dates: 2013-2014
Role: Contract UX/UI Designer, Concept Development

BioSpeech specialized in the science of speech therapy and development of speech technology. Their task was to build a game that incorporated the science, but my task was to visually make their speech therapy game fun, simple and accessible to children.

The experts at BioSpeech came to me with a lot of back-end thinking and information flow but had no concept for the game they were asked to develop. I worked with an illustrator to conceptualize and design the “Nemies,” a group of colorful, shape-based characters that were modeled after the sounds of different phonemes (units of sound) in the English language.

Initial concept options

The “Nemies” concept won out for multiple reasons. But the main reason is that the characters and scene were simple, highlighting the underlying phonemes that the characters represented. And they’re cute, right?

Many users of the Nemies game are young children on the autism spectrum who often are color blind and need simple visuals cues. As we worked on our concepts we kept coming back that need and making sure our design served the user.

Final UI design – gameplay view

While we developed the Nemies characters, I worked closely with BioSpeech’s app developer to ensure that the final deliverables were formatted in a way that they could be implemented easily. Here’s what that entailed:

Creating the characters in layers so that color could be applied via code
Ensuring all characters fit in the same size of box so they could swap in and out easily
Defining the size and spacing of the characters to work with as few and as many characters as possible on stage

Final character set