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Building a Digital Person: Design Best Practices

  Michael Musser and Maria Mancheno  ·  10 minute read

If you’ve ever had the joy of selecting a baby name, you know that it’s no easy task. Even if you haven’t had to name an eagerly expected child, you may have been part of a team or group trying to name itself. It’s hard to determine this single piece of a person or group’s identity.

Now imagine trying to determine what a new child will look like, how they’ll act, what they’ll be good at, how they’ll speak, and what they’ll laugh at. The task of defining an entire identity becomes exponentially more difficult. And such is the challenge of designing a digital person.

In early 2023 the FCAT AIX team created an FCAT digital brand ambassador that leveraged the latest in digital avatar design, generative AI-driven chat capabilities, and a blend of proprietary FCAT data and large language models. Collaborating with Soul Machines to bring the avatar to life, we had to define all the key attributes of our digital person – their ‘physical’ appearance, voice, personality, traits, and preferences. As we dove into the design process, we wanted to understand digital person design best practices and principles.

In this article we’ll walk through primary design decisions and share our key learnings for each:

  • Style of avatar
  • ‘Physical’ design decisions
  • Voice design decisions
  • Personality design decisions
  • Naming the digital person
  • The digital person ‘backstory’
  • The impact of specific tasks in making these choices
  • The impact of brand in making these decisions

But before we begin, a somewhat obvious question arises – given the ability to create many avatars, why not create multiple avatars that users could choose from? Our long-term vision is to have avatars that can be selected by the user or chosen for them based on a profile. But for our proof of concept, we started with a single digital person that best represented FCAT and could connect with a broad spectrum of users.

Style of Avatar: Realism Along Two Dimensions

Before we began the design process for our avatar, we had to decide which technical solution to leverage. Our technical architecture could support any API avatar driven platform, allowing us to select from a number of avatar vendors. As we explored the possible avatar options, we quickly saw two dimensions of realism being expressed: Form Realism and Behavioral Realism. On the form realism dimension, avatars’ visual representation can range from simplistic cartoon-like caricatures to highly rendered anthropomorphic instances. On the behavioral realism spectrum, avatars’ capabilities can range from static images with no animation to complex, subtle, human-like movements that both speak and emphasize non-verbal communication. See Figure 1 for a complete spectrum of possible avatar solutions.