CI-App – mike-kar

Empathy

In order to better understand our user group, we slipped into their shoes for a day. Questions arose: How do I wake up if I don’t hear the alarm clock? What if I need to call an emergency doctor? What are my colleagues laughing about? How do I explain to the kebab seller that I don’t eat meat without making a fool of myself? It quickly becomes clear: Text-messages are the biggest friend. However, not as quickly as we would like – and are used to.

Synthesis

After conducting several interviews with hearing-impaired students at the St. Lorenz school for the hearing-impaired in Schwäbisch Gmünd and also shadowing them for half a day we found out:

Being deaf is expensive. Loudspeakers and microphones are used to transmit the spoken word to the student’s hearing aid so that he can follow the lesson when it is quiet. But no one wants to carry around the impractical and unattractive devices. That’s why the hearing-impaired person has to rely on Mom to buy ice cream in his free time. Pretty tiring – and it’s not all. Keeping track of things in large groups borders on the impossible and a deep conversation is only conducted in sign language. Ergo: The circle of friends is limited to pigeons.

Ideation

So we asked ourselves, how could we…

…make emergency situations safer and thus minimize the helplessness of the deaf?

…improve the social skills of deaf people towards hearing people?

…make information more easily accessible in public institutions?

Based on that we defined the following principles:

1. The app should behave like a helpful person.

2. Keep the tools always available.

3. Design for the probable – count on the possible.

4. Offer choices – don’t ask questions.

5. Taking things away until the design collapses. Then add the last thing back.

Design

Use cases & what the app can do:

Connect to home devices such as bells, fire alarms, telephones, televisions, etc.

The watch can be used as an alarm clock with its vibration function. Loudspeaker announcements in public facilities (station, train, town hall, etc.) are transmitted directly to the Cochlear implant via radio. Connect Cochlear implant to Watch, connect Watch to other devices. For example, cell phone microphones can be used to transmit speech directly to the Cochlear implant.

This link will take you to our style guide (Unfortunately only in german):

https://xd.adobe.com/view/19ee3f9f-a28c-41e7-5da8-587cea98be58-6fdf/?fullscreen&hints=off