By Caren Chua

Over the years, NUS IT has sent out thousands of service messages and announcements, and if you can’t immediately recall what they are, they look like one of these:

Colour-coded (in red, green, yellow and blue to indicate its severity) and totally factual, these standard messages served the purpose of informing parties on IT service availability and security-related information. Yet if anyone had said it looked boring, lackluster and outdated, we would have to but hang our heads in humble admission.

This month, we welcome a little bunny, “bITbIT”! The use of an animal mascot was inspired by the likes of giant companies such as Carousell, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube who have owls, wizards, whales and crazy scientist as their message icons. bITbIT was conceived to be the icon of choice for these reasons – “RabbIT” is probably the only animal that has I.T. in it, thus resonating with its technology messaging; and its name “bITbIT” is a pun on both the rabbit and the bits and bytes that represent digital information.

With email glut sparing no one, it made sense to ensure our messages got read (they are important!) and not dismissed or junked away. We then gave the bunny idea to our SDE student intern Charlotte Ho whose dedication, energy and talent amazed us and did us proud.

From an ideation process that experimented with a host of facial features, Charlotte progressively added colours, expressions and accessories to lend meaning to every bunny’s service message and convey the intended level of severity.

And the outcome?

A complete suite of bunnies ready to meet and greet you with message announcements from NUS IT’s helpdesk! So one for one, a bunny with red background replaces the archaic-looking red banner, and the informational bunnies will don a pair of smarty spectacles against a blue backdrop. Over this time, you would have also met bITbIT on uNivUS:

In all, what went well in this message revamp was having the spirit and audacity to break out of norms to develop a message framework that is clear, intuitive and interesting. More importantly, it was a project developed by our student, for our university.

Like it is for every piece of work done with passion and tenacity, regardless of size or impact, it will in its own way leave a legacy in NUS.