DURATION : 2 months                                ROLE : Research, user research, management                               TEAM : Divina Lakkhiani, Dhvani Suba & me

Deafness is mild to total hearing loss, one ear or both, born or developed due to genetics, illness, infection, medication, ear trauma or aging.

We selected this brief because we saw there was a communication gap which required a positive change and innovation and a different subject to explore. 

10% of the french population is deaf out of which 88% are people who develop hearing loss and 12% people who were born with it.

ANALYSIS

Our team first decided to do some research on the internet in order to understand the what is deafness, what are the types & causes of deafness, how people communicate, how they feel about their deafness...

Here’s a small experiment we did to empathise with our users before we contact them. We tried to understand what they feel and what problems they might face.

This experiment taught us that :
• It is really tiring to focus visually on something, since every small thing we are doing requires our full concentration.
• We missed a lot of information and felt left out
• There was a lack in confidence while we spoke
• People talked less to us when we asked them to repeat a lot of times which made conversations more difficult.

I almost got hit by a tram, because I couldn’t hear it. 

From the hearing people we felt a lack of empathy during our experiment there is a gap between what hearing people say about their behaviour and what deaf people actually experience with them 

We contacted them through a facebook page called SOURDS & MALENTENDANTS, we realised it was a touchy subject when most  people were extremely helpful and some of them got offended.

The main problems they face are :
• Group conversations
• Difficulty in understanding
• Fatigue

Being the only French-speaking member of the group, I was in charge of interviewing deaf and hearing people, while my teammates took care of interviewing specialists.

Some people gave us their contact and from the insights we gathered for the survey, we defined that we would interview people who are born deaf and also who became deaf because we wanted to understand different mindsets and experience. Their level of deafness is severe to total hearing loss and they are facing problems in interacting with hearing people.

Because oral & lip reading can be tiring & difficult for them), we asked them what kind of interview they would prefer, mail, sms or video call . We wanted them to be comfortable because if they become too tired they would want to cut conversation which means we would have lost information. 

We asked our users if their friends and family would be willing to talk to us, so that we could also get the point of view of hearing people.
This gave us the opportunity to talk to family members, friends and colleagues.

We contacted specialists to get an expert's point of view on communication issues.

There were 5 similar problems they faced:

• Fatigue,  because of the level of concentration required to understand
• Group conversations are hard to follow because of lip reading. 
• Social isolation, because they run away from group events
• Missing information 
• Noise because it's distracting them from understanding, filtering and locating sound 

• At first they don't know how to communicate with the deaf person
• After a while they get used to it and don't pay attention anymore
• They don't mind putting efforts to help the deaf person, but strangers don't want to

• They are worried, in denial or frustrated when they lose hearing loss for another reason than ageing
• They don't know where to look at when there is several person in a conversation
• They want hearing people to treat them normally without forget their struggles

We analyzed each interview : what motivates them, what are their fears, interesting stories…etc
It quickly emerged that there were 4 different profiles with a common problem: group conversations

Before creating a solution we had to narrow the possibilities. Indeed they all had the same problem but in different contexts. We decided to focus on workplace because : 

• They spend most of their time here
• It’s the place where they face the most group conversation with strangers, who don’t want to put the effort.
• They can create better communication bond with people at work which could increase team coordination and communication of a group as a whole

Our goal is to help them to be fully integrated in group conversation, less tired at the end of the day, and get all the important information;
To do that we can focus on : 

• Accuracy, to help them to get important information
• Increase knowledge & reassuring : To make them more accepted in the society
• Save energy : to prevent them from overtiring themselves.
• Efficiency : to make communication easier between hearing & deaf people

IDEATION

Through numerous creativity games, we generated ideas, which we then classified, merged and iterated until we had 5 pre-concepts.

In order to choose which concept we would develop, we asked for feedback from our users, from hearing people working with our users and from experts. Before our interview, we shared the concepts with them so that they could take a look at them afterwards.
For those who had previously chosen written interviews, we created a survey. 

We decided to go for Spotlight Pod which is a workplace device that indicates the direction of the sound, provides real time subtitles. With the help of AI, Generates summaries and comes with a mini personal pod that can be used by the deaf person.

DEVELOPMENT