Generating Use Cases for Smart Earbuds
COMPANY: QUALCOMM
ROLE: DESIGN STRATEGY, USER RESEARCH, CONCEPT DESIGN
TEAM: ANNE KONERTZ, GINI KEATING
TIME: 3 MONTHS
The Challenge
In recent years, wireless smart earbuds or “hearables” have become a popular product category. Startups and tech giants are packing high-tech features into their headphones, from in-ear health monitoring to real-time curated audio. But what features truly matter to users? The Qualcomm product team asked us to discover user insights to guide the business and engineering efforts for Qualcomm’s future low-power Bluetooth audio chips.
A Strategic Approach
We kicked off our UX work with a three-day design sprint. Product, engineering, and business leads collaborated to learn about the priorities, questions, and challenges facing the hearables’ project. Inspired by the initial user research findings, we led the team through interactive design thinking exercises, from sketching to experience prototyping. The biggest accomplishment of the design sprint was establishing a shared understanding of this evolving product space, identifying the key strategic areas where Qualcomm can provide unique value, and creating a cohesive action plan.
Ethnographic Research
Building off the sprint, we focused our in-depth user research on three main use cases:
Hearing assistance when socializing in noisy environments
Listening to music while exercising
Active noise cancellation for traveling
While we explored several research questions for each use case area, one key question throughout the study revolved around audio curation: what do people want to hear or not want to hear when engaging in different activities in various contexts?
Translating Findings into Design Insights
Next, we transformed our research insights into design questions. We brainstormed and sketched alternate solutions to our design questions and translated our best ideas into storyboards detailing the ideal user experience for hearables in different scenarios. We rapidly prototyped the key concepts from our storyboards and quickly modified our designs based on what we learned from concept testing with users.
Using our refined storyboards, we collaborated closely with engineering and product management to identify UX concepts that were technically implementable and added value to Qualcomm's product offering. We also worked with audio and acoustic engineering teams to refine and write invention disclosure forms to patent our novel ideas.
Impact
Our research findings and experience design concepts directly contributed to developing new use cases, creating engineering requirements, and defining the product vision for Qualcomm's hearables' chip. The research uncovered actionable insights into audio curation, fitness tracking, and battery optimization that influenced the product roadmap. We also discovered new design opportunities, including leveraging the device ecosystem to improve system performance and usability and employing context awareness to enhance the overall user experience. In collaboration with engineering teams, our research findings and design ideas led to directly two new engineering patents for Qualcomm "Acoustic gesture detection for control of a hearable device" and "Acoustic path modeling for signal enhancement".
“The UX research for Hearables was instrumental in refining our understanding of the issues. These detailed studies led to the clear definition of use cases and enabled the identification of specific technical challenges that needed to be addressed, thereby crystallizing an execution roadmap. Deeper studies around psychological and sociological trends provided a more complete picture, allowing a clear shaping of our intended product. New innovative contexts were revealed, bringing new use cases, thus broadening the hearable product offering.”
— Nicolas Graube, VP of Technology, Qualcomm