We just celebrated 24 years of Viget. That’s two dozen years! This year, our Spring TTT in celebration of “Viget24” was a virtual extravaganza. We’ve put on a lot of virtual events over the years. Some with really strong themes and swag bags; some that focus on simple, meaningful time together; and others that let us enjoy learning something new as a team. Regardless of the rest of the experience, a key component of all of our virtual events is joy, achieved often through intentional levity. We think it’s important to laugh together! We see laughter as a way to expedite connection, and connection leads to rapport which makes us better at collaborating — and in turn leads to more quality products for our clients. 

Experimenting and iterating is a critical way we try to continually get delight right. We’re pretty pleased with one of our experiments from Viget24 that we called “Lovely Spring Day”.

A Lovely Spring Day

As we were brainstorming for this TTT, we thought about how to throw some joyful levity pizzazz into the pieces of our virtual events puzzle that have become pretty standard. How do we add lots of delight without adding lots of time to the action-packed schedule? We zeroed in on the virtual backgrounds we’ve been creating for every event — they add a layer of specialness. Of place. This isn’t any old virtual meeting. This is a TTT! 

Another key consideration for our team is figuring out creative ways to tie in inspiration from our industry and our work. AI has been an obvious contender —  we’ve discussed it and tied it in to some extent for the past several TTTs. But this time, we wanted to see how we could use AI for delight — marrying it with virtual backgrounds felt obvious. And so, a ”Lovely Spring Day” was born. 

The TL;DR is that we generated custom virtual backgrounds for every Viget employee that encapsulates their “ideal spring day.” We then played a 15-minute guessing game where people tried to guess who the background “belonged to.” Then, people had access to the full folder of AI-generated virtual backgrounds to look through. Vigets could then choose the background that spoke to them most and set it as their background. 

Read on for more on how we put this together!

Pre-Event Survey

To support all of our TTTs, we send out thoughtful pre-event logistics surveys 2-3 weeks before the big day. The survey lets us know where folks are joining from (where can we send their activity + snack packages?) and gives folks a chance to provide input on how the People Team can help folks enjoy and be present for TTT. This time, we also snuck in three questions, just “for giggles.”

• In one sentence, describe your ideal spring day.
• List three things that spark joy.
• What color do you think suits you best?

We did not share why we asked these questions. Sneaky, sneaky! When it’s low-key like this, the element of surprise is often a quick way to level up the delight.

Asking for a Friend

With rich data in hand about what makes people happy in spring, we were ready to generate the backgrounds. I was stoked! I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT for some time, so it was fun to be able to use the DALL-E 3 side of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. 

Who knew Prompt Engineering would be part of my role as a recruiter-who-helps-support-TTT-planning? I played around with a couple different prompts to generate these background images. Ultimately, my goal was to create backgrounds that were meaningfully different from one another but still felt good (i.e., something you might feasibly want to set as your virtual background and nothing freakily AI, like uncanny valley hands).

Here are the prompts I landed on that got me to our set of virtual backgrounds:

• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that encapsulates the vibe of a day with [ BLANK ].
• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that features [ BLANK ].

In the blanks, I wrote the things people included in their surveys. Those blanks were filled with everything ranging from dogs, cats, and friends to beverages, specific temperatures, yard games, carbohydrates, hammocks and more! Sometimes, I’d include a detail I knew about that person myself, even if it wasn’t in their survey. Yes, I occasionally editorialized for both clarity and whimsy! This was for delight purposes, but also helped serve my goal of having the backgrounds be “meaningfully different from one another.” It’s amazing how many people’s ideal spring day is as simple as having 1) moderate temperatures and 2) no pollen!

I generated 55 images. Throughout the process, DALL-E nailed it. I only needed to regenerate 2 or 3 images with clarifiers (and only because they included AI-specific outliers like disembodied hands). Huzzah!

Here are some of my favorites, along with their prompts in the captions. Can you guess who they belong to?

IRL

Ok, so for the actual activity we had the images ready to go in a private Google Folder. I took twelve of the images and put them in a very simple deck. I shared my screen, introduced the activity, and invited people to guess who they think each image belonged to in Slack. It was so fun seeing people throw out guesses and then narrow in with any verbal hints I gave!

Each image took about a minute. Then, we shared access to the Google Folder, gave folks a couple minutes to choose a background that called to them (their own image or someone else’s), and set it as their background. It felt like a magical moment to witness people finding and resonating with their own image or delighting in the ridiculousness of their coworkers’. We saved about 5 minutes for this piece, which felt right.

The whole Lovely Spring Day activity took just over 15 minutes! It was a perfect way to transition from a long meal break into our next grouping of content. And, we got to see the different backgrounds throughout the rest of the meeting.

Oh, the humanity!

I think this activity was successful for a couple of reasons.

1. People laughed! 

2. People felt seen. Some of these backgrounds were incredibly on point. Some of that was due to key folks having well-documented interests and a Slack-Famous Dog. 

But some of it was due to the People Team knowing about our people — our coworkers — beyond the sentence they wrote in. This uniquely human involvement helped me call an audible as needed and tweak prompts slightly to make the backgrounds feel even more relatable.

3. We could commiserate about our eventual AI overlords. (Did you notice that I say “please” in my prompts?!) Listen, Viget has plenty of practical, healthily skeptical people who are dubious about AI. GenAI is not always a fun, lighthearted thing. But using it in a fun, lighthearted way to do something it’s really good at was a nice use case and thought-provoking exposure even for people who are not into it.

4. We could see where we all align, and where we differ! It was amazing to see just how many people love picnics, covet their caffeine, and appreciate a bike ride. It was also cool to see some unique folks who simply crave a rainy spring day, or some beloved Buc-ee’s. What a rich tapestry of individuals — literally!

When we open an app or website, we do so to accomplish a task or find information. A well-designed user experience ensures users can achieve their goals efficiently. But what keeps us engaged beyond basic functionality? What differentiates a mundane interface from an exciting one? In my opinion as an up and coming UI developer, one key element is motion.

During my summer internship at Viget, I had the opportunity to dive deep into the world of agency work. From getting the chance to contribute to client sites to participating in a hackathon and pursuing a personal project, I seriously leveled up my stack and gained valuable development experience. Not to mention the amount I learned from exceptional, dedicated mentorship and micro-classes on everything from React to SQL to business models. 

However, coming into the internship, I had the specific goal of learning how to add motion to my web projects. I walked in on day one with no idea where to start, and now I’m leaving my last week with a complex knowledge of Rive, canvas elements, JavaScript animation, GSAP, and more. Here’s how… 

Spinet

In this two week hackathon project, I worked alongside Faye and Paul, the Product Designer and App Developer interns, to create a spinning wheel name picker. During the first week, I took on branding and visual design work. 

I spent the second week implementing wireframes. Through this project I learned how to transform client specifications into design directions, a style guide, and ultimately, UI components.

For this app, the motion of the spinning wheel was critical to the experience. Initially, client feedback indicated that the spin felt too uniform. I adjusted the motion parameters by extending the slowdown time and changing the easing function from linear to cubic, which increased feelings of suspense at the end of the spin animation. 

To add a level of joy and celebration to the winner announcement popup at the end of a spin, I incorporated confetti animations. In doing so, I discovered the world of JavaScript animation libraries that make implementing animations as easy as simple as adding the script to my HTML and adjusting the timing and placement of the animation object. Finally, we had ultimately decided on a modern, clean-cut video game aesthetic for the branding, and pulled this in through inspired sound effects, the logo design, and a 3D button component with a click animation accomplished entirely through Tailwind. 

Luna chatbot

After the hackathon, I got the chance to work on a personal project of my choice: an AI mental health chatbot inspired by tools like Woebot and EarKick. I was motivated by the question of what could make conversational AI feel less intimidating and more empathetic. My answer was an AI support companion with an animated avatar to enhance feelings of emotional connection and understanding. 

To get started, I experimented with various chatbot APIs and found that the Llama3 model was the best at following system prompts and offered the most natural interactions. A huge part of this project was the chatbot’s expression animations. I surveyed several popular tools and found Rive was the best fit for this, offering intricate animation capabilities, easy web integration, and a state machine for managing overlapping states and complex transitions.

The first step of animating in Rive is to create a design. Luckily, Rive has a vibrant open-source community, and I learned a lot from examining and remixing community files. The second step was learning to create the animations themselves. This was my first time animating anything, but the concept of keyframes was relatively intuitive, and the UI reminded me of video editing software, like iMovie, I’d used in the past.

The third and most challenging step for me was making all the animations work together in a state machine. 

This is the logic that connects animations together, taking input values that determine when to transition between states. Getting smooth animations between emotional states required a lot of rewiring and experimenting. Finally, embedding the Rive file in my project and linking the emotion data from API responses to the animation inputs was relatively straightforward using vanilla JavaScript. 

In conclusion

Animations, whether simple or complex, add a layer of interactivity and visual interest to digital products. Over a short 10 weeks, my internship projects allowed me to explore UI development, modern animation tools, and motion using CSS and JavaScript.

If you’re interested in bringing ideas to life and sparking joy through motion design, then diving into a passion project, seeking inspiration from the community, and exploring tools like Rive and GSAP will definitely kickstart your journey!