Wireless earphone interaction design

2016
At the time Ultimate Ears was known for its bluetooth speakers but there was an opportunity within the wireless headphone space to make a disruption as UE Boom did.

Goal

Nurture a wireless headphones concept through the design research process. Develop a holistic user journey and a novel device control scheme.

I was the UX Lead for a wireless earphones proposition for UE. The challenge was to uncover the attitudes and behaviours of potential product users and defining compelling use cases for these users packed with magical interactions in keeping with defined use cases and UX principles.

Design research activities

UX principles, cable length testing, button/control scheme simplification and automation, multiple size skew exploration for retail, product use journeys wireframing, APP install wireframing, defining and building prototypes.

Under the hood, my role was to define interaction schemes for the Bluetooth headphones. I leveraged Spotify analytics to inform the interaction scheme.

Finally, I collaborated with Andreas Connellan (product design) running feedback workshops for a retail POS experience.

Insights

100% remote collaboration was key to this project. We collaborated using Mural to bridge and extend our working days with my East Coast colleagues.

I learnt that making fast prototypes to check hypotheses really worked. Testing an idea by any means was key to make meaningful progress. I had additional support from my interns and Notion design studio.

Outcomes

UX principles, Storyboarding, Research findings, Ergonomic recommendations, Interaction design schematics. Retail proposition - including workshop deliveries. Prototypes.

Tools

UX Principles, Storyboarding, Mural.ly, wireframing, Hardware prototyping

Interaction schemes

Schematics on Mural

The interaction design schematics were built up to a detailed level through the design research process. Each step was support by prototypes and user research.
Physical interactions

Gestures formed a large part of the magical interaction scheme. Under the hood a gesture would initiate a sequence of events.

Prototyping

Button placement

Experiments were made to find the optimal positioning of the control buttons.
Band creep

During testing we discovered that the band would slide to one side during use. Here our intern an I were deciding if a grip or slide strategy would help centre the band.

This was made by myself to gain early insights on button positioning and what the silicon band feels like day to day.

Wireless earphone experience ‘How may we…” idea generation results synthesis. In person workshop, made remotely collaborative in Mural.

Literature research, user measurement research and ABC testing was carried out to understand the fitment of the design proposal.

Retail experience test on the use of 3 sizes of earphones — Retail experience test on the use of 3 lengths of earphones and 3 sizes of earbuds.

Recommendation

Jan has been one of the best designers and researchers I worked with over my career. His attention to detail, empathy for the customer, and collaboration is second to none. We were separated by an 8+ hour time zone difference, but he made collaboration simple. We accomplished a lot on weekly calls, and our virtual whiteboards had new notes and mock-ups every day. He had great attention to detail on everything from competitive product analysis to creating personas with key use cases. All of which tied back to clear UX strategy and designs. He helped drive forward new UX paradigms in hearables and always had new insights to share as he tested and iterated on designs. I would work again with him in a heartbeat.