Tencent practical case! Review of QQ dream expression design

The deep integration of "Internet + charity" has broken through the limitations of traditional charity, making "everyone charity, fingertips charity" a trend. The forms of charity such as donating love and steps are becoming more diverse, and the experience of participating in charity is getting better and better. On this year's 99 Charity Day, QQ launched the "QQ Dream Expression Charity Project", allowing everyone to help mountain children realize their dreams by downloading charity expression packages. In this event, we designed interesting experiences and actively practiced design for good, hoping to get more users to actively participate in charity.

QQ Dream Emoticons help children realize their dreams

In 2018, Tencent officially launched the Tech for Social Good project to guide technology and products to amplify the goodness of human nature, achieve healthy development, and use technology to alleviate the pain of a digital society.

In the past, the traditional charity model carried out by charity organizations with the help of traditional media faced many problems, especially narrow coverage and low participation, which greatly hindered the effectiveness of charity projects.

With the development of Internet technology, the speed of public welfare dissemination has become faster, and the ways of audience participation have become more diverse and low-threshold. Creative indirect donation methods such as donating steps during exercise and donating through shopping can all achieve public welfare behaviors. The advantages in many aspects can enable hundreds of millions of people to participate in a public welfare activity. The emergence of Internet public welfare platforms has greatly increased user participation and expanded the effect of public welfare.

With the arrival of this year's "99 Charity Day", QQ actively practices "Technology for Good" and uses technology and products to help solve social problems.

• “I want to be a little painter and draw beautiful pictures every time I go out to play.”
• "I want to go to a good university. I hope to receive an admission letter from Tsinghua University in the future."
• "I want to be a doctor and fight the virus. After treating patients, I want to look at the flowers and plants."...

QQ noticed that there is a group of innocent and simple children living in the quiet mountainous areas. They have all kinds of rich dreams in their hearts, but due to the relatively backward educational resources in the mountainous areas, it is particularly difficult for the children to realize their dreams.

At the same time, QQ also noticed that these children were not only full of dreams but also liked to draw, so they invited them to draw their dreams, and used their unique social and cultural attributes to extract and create dream-fulfilling emoticons from their dream paintings. Finally, they planned this year's "QQ Dream-fulfilling Emoticons Charity Project" to help children in mountainous areas realize their dreams by building this Internet charity platform.

How design can help charity

The first glance at children's dream paintings can make people smile, and a closer look will reveal that the paintings have a beauty that is difficult for ordinary adults to imitate. Children have artistic spirit and can use very few lines to draw rich details of life and make people imagine.

In the painting "Watching Cherry Blossoms", the wavy pink strip on the right side of the head of the left character looks like a ponytail set off by the surrounding pink cherry blossoms; in "National Table Tennis Players", the entire movement trajectory of the ping-pong ball from being hit to touching the table, then to the opponent's receiving the racket, and finally to landing and bouncing twice, was vividly drawn by the child with simple lines and graphics; in the painting "Flying to Space", the limbs of the little girl look like she is floating in the space without weight, and also like she is jumping for joy; in "I am the First Prize", there are a few small graphics drawn with simple lines around the protagonist, which look like the light of the protagonist, and also like the flash of the camera in the front row...

These interesting paintings allow everyone to see that there are children with great potential for artistic creation, and they are moved by them. So we try to empower through design, and strengthen this feeling from three points in the design of H5 for this event: making the experience scene interesting, the expressions interesting, and the emotions sustainable, so that the children's talents can be fully blossomed on this new stage of public welfare H5.

1. Make the experience scene interesting

During the entire experience scenario stage of the charity event, we discovered and set some design highlights to allow users to gain interesting experiences from the event, thereby arousing the love and kindness in their hearts and taking charity actions.

In the initial contact stage, we designed dynamic banners, dynamic online status indicators, QQ message emoticon easter eggs and various posters to stimulate users' curiosity and click on H5 to discover this charity event.

After the user enters H5, we first use an interesting short video to show the beautiful charity background: children hand-painted their dreams. QQ used these paintings as inspiration and combined with its own IP Little Yellow Face emoticon to create a dream-fulfilling emoticon package. After the short video, the emoticon package with interesting designs is displayed in series, allowing users to fully feel happy and be touched, so that they can click the page button to download the dream-fulfilling emoticon package, activate the corresponding charity funds for the construction of mountain campuses, and help mountain children realize their dreams.

After users complete the public welfare action of downloading the emoticon package, we live up to their expectations and give them the extra surprise of their dream paintings, pushing their emotions to a climax, thereby prompting them to take further actions - sharing activity links, sharing support posters, sending "QQ Dream Come True" emoticons, spreading positive energy to others, and inviting more people to participate.

2. Make your expressions interesting

Enriched design of original story

Have you ever thought that an emoji of "so happy" comes from the dream of becoming an astronaut and flying in space, an emoji of "love you pen refill" comes from the dream of becoming a painter, and an emoji of "go for it" comes from the dream of getting admitted to Tsinghua University... Children's dream paintings all express positive and happy emotions without exception, but according to statistics, the emotions most commonly used by QQ users are rich and varied. In order to cleverly combine the emoji package with the story of the painting, retaining the original story of the painting and making the emoji package more social and spreadable, we designed the emoji package from three aspects: mood, timeliness and hot spots, and online language.

In a dream painting full of fantastic ideas, we extracted the moods of "happy" and "proud" based on the imaginative "cake planet", "space school" and the twisting body elements of the yellow face, and transformed them into the "beautiful" emoticon mood by making them interesting. At the same time, we associated them with associative words such as "I don't know", "hehe", and "come on", which strengthened the social nature of the expressions.

In a painting of a dream of becoming a doctor to treat patients, combined with the timeliness of the epidemic and based on the public's expectation for the elimination of the epidemic, we focused our design on the virus in the painting, obtained content about the virus retreating, and after associating it with fun, we obtained a "go away" expression full of positive energy, thereby increasing the spread of the expression.

In a dream painting of thanking the teacher and wanting to become a gardener of the motherland to teach and educate people, we slightly modified the learning content on the blackboard into the commonly used Internet phrase "key point", added a knocking action, and the overall coordination resulted in the "knock on the key point" emoticon package, which combines the positive educational feeling of the original painting with the fun of the commonly used Internet phrase.

"Hand-painted" design treatment

The children's paintings are real and rough in terms of artistic expression. These creations without systematic education contain more vivid highlights, which is also the unique style of "original art". In order to preserve this hand-painted texture and make it accepted by the public, we constantly adjusted the visuals and finally achieved satisfactory results.

Irregular lines

In the process of selecting the style of the emoji package, we abandoned the common children's style processing in graphic design and chose to retain the irregular, asymmetrical, uneven and incomplete characteristics of children's paintings, trying to show the original appearance of the paintings as much as possible. In the emoji package, you can see braids of different sizes, legs of different lengths, misplaced eyes, unsmooth facial lines, and teeth arranged like a wall... By continuing the irregular graphic lines, these interesting "weird" things can be preserved.

Stop-motion animation simulation

During the production of expression animation, we chose the most traditional frame-by-frame painting method. We wanted to restore the most original and simple texture with the stuttering style of "stop-motion animation" and overlay hand-drawn pictures one by one, so as to evoke the beautiful memories of early animation in users' hearts.

In order to make the animation more visually reasonable, we used the smoothness of AE animation production as a reference for the movements, and then hand-painted each frame, with the aim of making the expressions come alive in the most original image.

After careful consideration of the relationship between the dream story and the hand-painted feeling of the painting, the dream-fulfilling emoticon package has moved away from the common mainstream style, and its unique fun is ready to emerge. It is not perfect in terms of visual standards, but we hope to arouse users' yearning for innocence with this seemingly unprocessed imperfect reality.

3. Emotional persistence

The change in the world does not come from a few people doing a lot, but from everyone doing a little. Public welfare needs to be sustained over the long term.

Many chat software now provide a variety of emoticon packages, which help people save the trouble of typing, fully express emotions, and convey rich emotions, which has become an indispensable part of everyone's daily chat. We use emoticon packages as the core element of this charity event, hoping that after the event ends in just a few days, the act of love will continue. You can still search and download the "QQ Dream" emoticon package for this charity in the QQ and WeChat emoticon mall. By sending "QQ Dream" emoticons to other users, more people can understand the charity story behind the emoticon package, and infect more people to enter the charity and easily join the charity queue.

For users, the charity emoticon package is also a kind of commemoration. It can awaken users' behavioral and emotional memories of this charity event, and allow users to continuously demonstrate their self-worth and obtain self-emotional satisfaction in the process of continuously sending it to others.

Conclusion

Nowadays, more and more people hope to spend their time more meaningfully, desire to be respected, to gain something, and regard being a "special me" as the value of life. The Internet public welfare platform provides a good opportunity for this.

In the "charity-platform-user" ecosystem, design empowerment can increase user participation and help the public welfare ecosystem develop sustainably and in a more benign way. We will continue to think about how to empower public welfare through design and practice design for good.