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Project Overview:

For this project I worked on a team with 5 of my peers for our final project for the Design of Everyday Things course at UCSD. Our prompt was to choose an everyday object, in our case earbuds. We were given 3 weeks to conduct user research, analyze interview data, ideate solutions to identified problems, and produce a low-fidelity redesign sketch of earbuds.

Problem Statement:

For many people, music plays a part in our everyday lives. Even for those that do not play a musical instrument, chances are the vast majority of people listen and consume music, usually via earbuds or headphones. However, earbuds are not without their flaws. Trouble locating them once lost, trouble telling earbud and case charge levels, and often confusing their earbuds’ tap features.

Our goal for this project was to improve the user experience by reducing the need to memorize specific gestures, implement features that prevent loss or damage of the earbuds, and implementing features that give the user more information on the state of their earbuds.

Challenges:

  1. Simplify and differentiate the gestures required to activate particular functions/features
  2. Prevent earbuds from falling to the ground when the user is in moderately intensive physical activities
  3. Reduce instances of the user’s earbuds and earbuds case running out of charge unbeknownst to the user

Discovering Issues:

Brainstorming

Prior to conducting user interviews, we brainstormed possible problems we might expect to see based on each of our past experiences with both wired and wireless earbuds and arranged these ideas in a mind map.

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Quantitative Research

Conducted user interviews to gain a basic understanding of our users and the brands of earbuds they use. We interviewed 16 users and recorded their responses via Google Sheets. And based on the responses here are the key insights presented below: