Hermie
UX Design, Brand Design, Conversational Interface (CI) Design
6 weeks
The Challenge:
A growing concern in Australia regarding consent boundaries and healthy partnerships between both sexes requires an urgent reevaluation of how this education can be addressed in an accessible and personalised manner. The demand for early education around healthy sexual health education and partnerships is increasing, yet for teen boys, it remains a struggle to access, as concerns regarding discretion and toxic masculinity prevail.
The Solution:
Working collaboratively with Marco, Mai, and Athina across wireframing, illustration, and UX prototyping, we developed Hermie, a speculative AI-powered chatbot platform embedding sexual health education within an immersive Greek mythology narrative. Hermie is named after Hermes, the Greek god of communication and messages, the ideal name for a Greek mythos-themed chatbot.
Key Features & Highlights
How can the use of brand and user experience design produce positive experiences in supporting young men and their understanding of sexual health and consent?
The Approach
By my observation, teenage boys are increasingly drawn to gaming culture and, notably, to the resurgent popularity of Greek and Roman mythology, partly through games, partly through the rise of the 'stoic' and 'warrior' archetypes in online communities. Rather than fighting this cultural pull, Hermie needed to lean into it.
By framing sexual health education as a mythology-driven quest where users help flawed Greek gods learn from their mistakes, the platform recontextualises sensitive topics clearly without being overly confronting or "embarrassing". Compared to typical clinical forums for teenage boys, it minimises the lectural atmosphere but gives boys an active mission to help gods like Medus, Athena or Hera, understanding and reflecting in the process.
This narrative framework also solves the discretion problem. At a glance, Hermie looks like a game, which becomes an intentional design choice through further branding.
The Outcome
The Reflection
Hermie was a healthTech application positioned in a culturally complex problem space, focusing on heavy topics around sexual health for a demographic resistant to open discussion in the space. The addition of AI makes these areas, alongside data training and privacy, substantially more risky and requires key considerations, which we navigated through further research and reflection.
Some additional learnings included:
The reinforcement that the most effective design solutions often work indirectly. Such as solving the emotional and social barriers to engagement before addressing the problem itself. The breakthrough came not from asking how to design a sexual health app, but from asking what teenage boys already trust, enjoy, and feel safe using to communicate their feelings.
Designing conversational interfaces that are personable and engaging to users beyond their value as an AI. Hermie's brand and features have significant room to grow, particularly in developing more personalised, adaptive narratives and expanding its discretion features as natural language processing matures. As AI becomes integrated across all platforms as a must, not a nice-to-have, branding and creating personalities for these AIs become a key differentiator. We now see this through Claude and Notion AI's unique branding and illustrations.
Given the opportunity to continue developing the platform, establishing deeper AI personalisation and broader representation of LGBTQIA+ experiences would be the natural next steps.
