ReSound GN - UX Research & Design

Deep Insights Research, Service Design, UX Design

 A leading hearing aid manufacturer in Europe hired McKinsey Design to define next-generation hearing aids
 The design team was brought in to define a consumer journey with the right strategic fit to the untapped costumer segment of mild hearing loss patients.
In partnership with McKinsey quant team, we worked to define a leading mass-market Over-the-Counter product value proposition.
Role & Team Setup
 I worked with another designer and a Lead. We also partnered with an industrial designer in the Sweden office to lend expertise on the form factor of the product. Our design workstream ran in parallel with the McKinsey analysts' quantitative workstream.
We conducted competitive research on the hearable (wearable in-ear) tech space
We gathered initial learnings about the current patient journey and experience based on secondary research and competitive research about the hearable (wearable in-ear) tech space.

Current stated customer journey map

We ran in-depth interviews with people who have mild to moderate hearing loss
​​​​​​​The design team conducted deep insights research with target users, individuals with mild to moderate hearing loss, using a series of printed stimuli to co-create ideas and elicit feedback on early concepts. 
We wanted to understand:
- What are the reasons that people with mild to moderate hearing loss do not use hearing aids?
- What are their attitudes around hearing aids, and their hearing loss?
- What frustrations and pain points do they have?
From the research we uncovered two distinct personas, distinguished by differing attitudes around their hearing loss and hearing aid usage.

We printed persona card booklets to be distributed to the clients during the workshop. First two pages shown only.

The research findings & insights formed the basis for the future-state journey map.
The future-state journey map mapped our solutions of hearing aid adoption along the touchpoints of shopping, acquisition, purchase, and day-to-day use.
We then created high-fidelity wireframes to use as stimuli during second round of research to validate and refine the ideas.​​​​​​​
We tested our polished wireframes on a second round of evaluative research, which led us to further refine our concepts.

Sample wireframes

Sample wireframes

Finally, we created an experience blueprint to visually describe key interactions and touchpoints.
The experience blueprint maps the ideal experience; the North Star.
It provides a simple and clear high-level overview of each interaction, telling the story from the beginning to end.

This is a "birds eye view" of the experience blueprint. An experience blueprint is an operational tool that visually describes the key interactions and touchpoints along the ideal experience. It provide a simple and clear high-level overview of each interaction, so as to tell the story from the very beginning to the very end.

The final deliverable was a solution set that included a design blueprint for breadth, and visual prototypes for depth. 

For each element in the blueprint, we expanded the interaction to include a deeper description of this experience, including customer quotes from our research that support this idea, key functions that it would have, and experience principle that underlies it.

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