Studies on Hearing Aid-to-PC Interactions
Overview
How difficult is the experience of connecting your headphones or other audio devices to your computer or phone? If the answer is anything less than “effortless” or “seamless” then you may find you have something in common with the millions of working adults who use hearing aids. Modern hearing aids are useful not just for understanding local sound sources, one of their most important functionalities is that they can stream audio directly from a digital audio source to users’ ears using Bluetooth. This makes them technologically quite similar to other “hearables” such as earbuds, headphones, or Bluetooth speakers, which all have similar issues when it comes to connecting easily, reliably, and intuitively to other devices. While working with the Research Experience Definition (RED) team within Intel’s client computing group, I led three cross-functional user studies investigating the experience of hearing aid users with their PCs.
Problem Statement
How can the technology and experience of pairing hearing aids to PCs be designed
to avoid the existing pain points users experience?
to avoid the existing pain points users experience?
Methods
RED team is made up primarily of anthropologists. Therefore, I took the opportunity to run some ethnographically inspired interviews. They were in-depth and involved discussing product ideas, walking through a day in the life with participants, and eliciting events from their everyday life where their hearing loss or hearing aids affected their social interactions or digital technology use. While I didn't complete a full thematic analysis of these interviews, it was a chance to do a nimbler reflection and summarization process with my team members and anyone who had sat in on any of the interviews. What resulted was a lean deck that could be presented to a variety of stakeholders from business planners to technology teams to executives.
The final part of this study was run on a tight timeline: the organization was going to lose access to Dscout–the remote user research platform we would be using–in only two weeks. In that time, I had to lead and manage all interactions with participants for a one-week diary study, as well as select a few of the most active participants to be part of concept testing in the second week. This meant a quick schedule of recruitment through Dscout's screening process and a lot of back and forth with potential participants in the first few days of the study, complicated by the fact that we were only interested in speaking to hearing aid users who used a PC, which is an already-limited pool of participants within Dscout. However, setting up daily diary study tasks allowed me to quickly gather a range of data and media: lists of apps used in a day, pictures of users' workspaces, and videos of them describing pain points in their work life. This led to rich conversations and insights when we progressed to concept testing and several participants were engaged enough that they wanted to be contacted about further studies on this topic.
Becky, the designer on the team, created three storyboards depicting idealized solutions to problems seen in hearing aid-to-PC connections. I helped strategize what interactions to include to best cover the topics we wanted to get feedback on, as well as prompt more conversation. I also had to be comfortable explaining and socializing the storyboard concepts themselves because I was going to be running the concept testing sessions solo. In each session I presented the three storyboards, along with one video prototype developed by another Intel team, described what the participants were seeing in the storyboard, collected feedback including how they imagined the solution could work in their own lives, and finally asked how they would rank the four potential solutions from most to least useful.
Outcomes
The findings, theoretical implications, and organizational outcomes of this research are being published at this year’s Ethnography Practice in Industry Conference (EPIC). See video below of an early version of the October 2023 EPIC presentation.