JOHN LEDINGHAM

We started with the notion that there was an untapped market opportunity for Plantronics: Home-based knowledge workers seeking a high-quality audio experience. Armed with that hypothesis, we conducted formative research to understand exactly what our users needed, and how we could improve their productivity and overall experience. Once we identified the core need - consolidation of their communication devices - we set out to develop a portfolio of products. The solution required our team to design the hardware and embedded software, to prototype, test and ultimately validate the concept before taking it to market.

Formative Research - Ethnography/Contextual Inquiry

Our process began with a series of home visits, in North America, to understand how remote knowledge workers were using technology when away from the office. The team's hypothesis was that home-based workers needed a solution for managing disparate communication technologies. This hypothesis would be validated through our research.

A consistent challenge for nearly all participants was the small amount of physical space allotted to a home office. 

The mixing of office and personal space led users to implement some very creative solutions, but it was rarely deemed optimal.

Too many different technologies, too many modes of communication...and too many cables!

Persona Development

Based on our initial ethnography/contextual inquiry, we built four personae that represented our four primary target users. Between these four personae, all of our users’ core scenarios and use cases were documented and illustrated. This allowed the team to focus solely on the most important aspects of the product - if a new feature or attribute didn't solve for one of the four personae, it was pushed to the backlog. Based on "real" people, the personae were amalgams of the participants we met during our home visits. The persona template used for the Calisto program is one that I brought with me from Whirlpool/KitchenAid - it's simple, visual and unique enough to provide distinction between the various personae.

Round One Concept Development

Based on our initial in-home visits, we developed a wide range of illustrated "problem/solution" (user story + potential solution) statements, storyboards and preliminary product concepts. These concepts focused on combining and simplifying communication modes, providing a choice of audio endpoints (headsets, speakerphones and visual alerts), and reducing visual and physical clutter in the home office. We would later share this work with our original group of participants in order to understand how well they felt we had solved their respective problems.

Formative Research - Concept Testing

For our second round of research, we revisited our original group of participants in North America, as well as expanding our methodology to include focus groups in the US, London, and Stockholm. We combined the work in Stockholm with home/office visits with employees of Telia, Sweden's largest telecommunications company. The goal of this work was validate that our initial concepts had merit, and could potentially solve the user-challenges uncovered in our first round of ethnography/contextual inquiry.

One unexpected insight was that European participants, especially those in the UK, were unwilling to share personal information - like location and status - with their employers; they saw this as a flagrant invasion of their privacy.

Early Concept Direction

The results of the research clearly pointed to a device that act as a singular point of interaction for the user's multiple "channels" of communication (mobile phone, desk phone and soft clients, like Skype). There was also a strong desire for flexibility with regard to the audio endpoint - some wanted a speakerphone, while others wanted a headset.

In the home, the speakerphone was the preferred method of interacting with the mobile phone, desk phone and PC. There were some users who also wanted a headset. Providing a solution for both would be a significant design challenge.  

in order to capture and illustrate the appropriate design language target for our users/customers, our team built Mood Boards. Because our new product was intended to live in a residential environment, it was critical that the team understand interior design and architectural trends. My work at KitchenAid certainly helped to inform the insight-gathering process, but trends change quickly, so we had to revisit the latest in interior design, and finish and furnishing movements. 

After establishing a visual language, and a target context, for the product our team began to develop a series of more refined concepts. At this point, the technology was beginning to solidify, which allowed us to focus on the overall form, HMI and GUI. The concept included a wireless remote which could be worn by the user when away from the device, providing realtime alerts, telephony and messaging - this component was later abandoned. 

The Chosen Product Concept

The selected concept was dubbed the "Smart Speakerphone" because it included a singular, unifying user interface for all three primary modes of communication (mobile phone, desk phone and PC), as well as a high-quality speakerphone with a remote lapel microphone. Bluetooth was included in order to establish a link between the speakerphone and the mobile phone. 

There were several very challenging requirements associated with the HMI and GUI:  One, the product UX was initially designed for a touchscreen, which was abandoned halfway through the program for cost reasons, and replaced with a conventional LCD display and buttons. Two, the product connected to three very different products (mobile phone, desk phone and PC soft phone client). Establishing one UI model to fit all three presented many hurdles. Three, simply communicating what the product did, and how it could benefit the user, was difficult - it was a new category for which there were few analogs; the UI needed to be self-explanatory and setup had to be heavily curated.