Rap battles
Ultimate Ears (UE) needed to innovate on the success on its UE BOOM mobile speaker. How could the UE BOOM stay relevant? 2016
Goal
This project was a case resulting from a company-wide idea framing project. The goal was to use a lean, design thinking process to establish the desirability of a rap battle experience for UE BOOM users.
Research activities
Market research, Workshops, Blok Parties, Student parties, Community centre Rap battles, expert reviews etc
Insights
We had created a novel and primarily fun experience that had the potential to become a shareable experience.
The Rap Battle market opportunity in terms of views. Rap Apps popular too.
Early prototypes used during the first workshops and sprints. Variety of experiences were explored in this phase.
Research sprints
Three research Sprints were carried out by myself, Garry McKee and Baljit Mudhar. The research question was:
Can we facilitate fun, self-propagating and shareable experiences by facilitating rap battles?
Youth centre, Shannon
Adult rappers, Shannon
Freestyle rappers, Cork city
Empathy mapping was used to organise the group feedback.Test 2 introduced an App to facilitate the battles and test 3 used a refined App with user-requested backing tracks.
Empathy maps from Shannon rap battles
Freestyle rap battle
This was the final prototype where the video was sufficient to communicate to management what the experience was and why it should be invested in.