Can’t hear? Don’t worry about the WHAT, worry about the WHY. That’s what my team and I did when our challenge was to help customers wear their hearing aids more consistently. Funny enough, the majority of this project was spent listening to what the customers had to say. Then, we could devise the solution.
UX Generalist
5 Weeks
Sketch, Meistertask, Illustrator, Lucidchart
So..where to start? Probably at the beginning. No, wait...at the end. Well, sometimes the middle is a perfectly good place.
Confusing? Not at all! Where to start all depends on the project and timeline.
Typically, I start projects with making sure I understand the deadline. Then I get a huge cup of coffee, because that’s probably going to be the last space minute I have, until the project is complete.
After the coffee (or two...or three) I choose a design thinking process and gather a list of activities to accomplish this project on time. If there’s one thing I watch...it’s my watch, to ensure tasks and projects are completed when they are expected.
After defining the activities, I used Mesistertask, a collaborative tool to create weekly iterations known as Sprints. As the project moves along the process, the tool tracks velocity to help the project stay on schedule. It also helps multidisciplinary teams to track the progress of the project. When I was a young man, I never realized how much I would grow to appreciate some really good velocity for a feeling of accomplishment!
Once I have all the information I need, I began a competitive analysis, to see what the competitors are doing. In this case, I was able to see that ReSound main competitors are: Signia, Oticon ON, and Starkey. All of them are already implementing the Internet of things within their devices to track user's behaviors. Good for them - and good for me, because now I can learn from their progress and improve on it.
Signia My Control has a Voice Activity tracking that visualizes how the user has been participating in a conversation. One of the primary goals of amplification is to encourage dialogue and social engagement.
Starkey Thrive: Thrive Wellness Score is a combination of both Brain and Body scores. You can reach a score of 200 each day.
Oticon ON: has many features like Which programs the patient is using the most, how often they are changing the programs, set time goals for hearing aid usage and tracks progress over days, weeks or even a month of hearing aid usage.
Time to check my watch and get going on what all of this research means. While ReSound has an easy to use App to help users customize sounds to hearing devices, it is following behind with competitors. Therefore, this is a disadvantage as most competitors have tracking features. The existing ReSound app has only a feature called "general advice" to encourage usage, but the information needs more context to engage users with hearing aid devices. To be relevant in the industry, ReSound needs to innovate. The work is then done at my innovation station (pretty much just a fancy name for my computer).
Innovating in this industry is generally difficult because of the implications and regulations. It is also essential to define clearly the user's needs to sympathize with their daily life. My daily life struggles include not being able to take enough coffee breaks. Not everyone else has the same pain points (though I suspect in that case, many do).
I interviewed hearing aid patients that used different brands, to hear what they were and weren’t hearing and to understand what it’s like to wear a device like this all day.
After conducting ten in-person interviews, I was able to identify the personality of three frequent users. Still, since the majority of ReSound users are over 60 years old, I further explored the baby boomer generation. One thing all of us had in common - we enjoyed coffee.
Improve quality of life
Clear conversations with friends and family
Always asking people, “What? Excuse me?”
“My brain works so hard to decipher sentences and phrases from a jumbled mess.”
• Remind Brad in the morning about using his hearing aids.
• Alert him when he is walking away from his hearing aid device.
• Notify Brad that by not using his hearing aid he could be missing conversations.
• Remind Brad why it is important for him to use his hearing aid device all-day.
• Practice to incentivize progress.
Once the needs and wants of hearing aid users were defined, I started thinking about how we could create a unique experience. And this is where I found that medical devices do not take advantage of behavior change techniques. These techniques are standard in retail, finance, and social media. To persuade users on buying or using their products and services. Therefore, I thought that it would be great to implement some of these techniques to improve the experience of users by using a tracker and data visualization in the Smart Fit 3D to encourage positive new habits among hearing aid users.
I wasn’t sure if this was the jackpot, but at least it felt like I was in the game.
When focusing on ideation, I mainly focus on the best implementations of behavioral change techniques, since there are many types, I found the most effective methods when using a mobile device. Some of these techniques are common in fitness or diet apps. Their purpose is to help users track and monitor progress while getting support from loved ones or communities. I was getting closer (the caffeine must have kicked in).
To put all the ideas generated from the research together, I had to create prototypes that combine what was learned about user's needs and behavioral change techniques. Therefore, the creation of user flows and sketches gave life to my first low fidelity prototype that was then used for testing.
I was able to conduct three rounds of usability testing, with a total of ten users. Mostly to identify usability issues. I also had the opportunity to work closely with an audiologist to conduct usability testing to understand better both perspectives from patient's and doctor's points of view. I never thought I would be able to understand a doctor so well - but I did, and I wasn’t even wearing a lab coat.
In my first usability test, I was able to fix user flows by clarifying the call of actions from the monitoring page. On the second usability test, I was able to find issues with the naming and color conventions on the goals page. And the last usability, I spent two days improving the reward experiences.
In the end, the challenge of the project made me more knowledgeable about medical devices by understanding the communication that happens between patients and doctors. What made this project exciting was realizing that my design could help patients feel better and help improve their lives by using design and psychological principles while crafting innovative ideas for ReSound.
The biggest challenge I found during this project was navigating in a sea of acronyms and medical terms that I had no clue what they were. Therefore, I thanked audiologists with beer on my last day. I also thanked myself with two beers and a large coffee!