During my Advanced Special Topics in Design course, I learned how to implement a human centered design approach to address complex design problems faced by a specific subset of individuals. At the end of the semester, our project teams presented the customer-focused products, services, and systems we had come up with to covering a wide range of subjects, ranging from bicyclist safety, beachfront pollution, to the user experience of flying commercially.
For context, human centered design is what researcher Donald Norman calls “a philosophy, not a precise set of methods, but one that assumes that innovation should start by getting close to users and observing their activities.”
Design theory and methodology professor Kosa Goucher-Lambert broke up his course into four units:
I. research, to better understand the end user’s behaviors and needsThroughout the span of the course, two other mechanical engineering students, a design student, and I studied the habits and behaviors of various types of individuals in order to ‘reinvent’ the conventional alarm clock. As students with busy schedules and obligations, all four of us were part of love-hate relationships with our alarms clocks, and wanted to try to alleviate some of the difficulty typically experienced getting up in the morning.
With a topic in mind our group first generate as many SET factors related to alarm clocks and the process of waking up on time as possible. Standing for social, economic, and technological, these factors are meant to help identify opportunities for further research and ultimately solutions to problems many people face. The gap between currently available solutions and the potential for a new, useful solution is known as a Product Opportunity Gap (POG).
As an example of both SET factors and how they might lead to a POG, consider the Hyperloop, a proposed fifth mode of transportation achieved by moving pods at high speeds in low pressure tubes at near vacuum:
In the more humble case of the alarm clock, we identified factors such as the economic benefits of waking up on time for work, the value of being on time for activities with friends, and the benefits sleep monitoring technology might have on the experience of being woken up.
With these and similar ideas in mind, we brainstormed as many product opportunity gaps as possible, and began to loosely categorize them by subject. Some of the 40+ new product opportunities included “establishing better sleeping habits”, “reducing the effects of post-nap grogginess”, and “minimizing snoozing”.
In order to arrive at a single POG to pursue in our research and prototyping stages, our group chose five of the POGs we found were the most interesting and ‘prototype-able’. Next, we used a weighted matrix to assign importance to a number of different criteria, as well as how well we thought each POG met these criteria. We finally consolidated the two top scoring opportunities into one cohesive mission: establishing good sleeping habits for you and those around you.
As we refined our problem statement, our team sent out anonymous online surveys to gather data about the quality and quantity of sleep people get on a nightly basis, as well as their means and motivations to wake up in the morning. Most reported using their phones to wake up, and almost all had experienced being woken up early by a roommate or partner’s alarm unintentionally.
A step further, we conducted one-on-one interviews with friends, family, and strangers to learn about their sleeping environments—asking specifically how they interact with their roommates or partners, how they tend to wake up in the morning, and how their rooms might help or inhibit their nightly and morning rituals. Most of our interviewees consented to have their rooms photographed, in order to give us more information about their sleeping environments and routines.
We learned that most teenagers and young adults rely on their phones to wake up, and often keep them close by during sleep. What’s more is that most interviewees in this demographic routinely use their phones for at least 15 minutes before going to bed. We saw this as a design opportunity, and is part of what motivated us to focus our design efforts to fit the needs of college-age adults. We further refined our POG to “help college-age students with diverse schedules and living situations get enough good sleep.”
With a better understanding of our target customers, we analyzed a number of potential competitors that offer alarm various kinds of clocks. In particular, we were interesting in companies whose alarm clock wake users with novel means (e.g. light stimulus), and those featuring biometric feedback to monitor sleep quality. By understanding our competitors and their products, we can isolate a target market segment and customer base. In our case, having decided to market to college age students, we decided our solution should be fairly inexpensive and as a result far more rudimentary than Amazon’s Echo Dot, for example. These and other exercises allowed our team to decide how our solution might be best implemented given the market, and helped us arrive at a product market fit.
With a problem to solve and a user group to tailor our solution to, we started coming up with ideas for a device to improve the sleep and wake up habits of cohabiting young adults. Similar to our POG generation phase, we wrote out concepts, or potential solutions, on paper and arranged them into a few succinct categories (direct contact, indirect contact, socially related concepts, etc.). This list of concepts was inspired from a number of design heuristics, as a way to get us to ‘think outside the box’ while coming up with potential solutions.
After ideating a poster board’s worth of ideas, some more seemingly ridiculous than others, each team member chose three of the concepts they felt would best satisfy our product opportunity gap, and might have the highest perceived value to our key user group.
From the seven concepts that remained, our group used another weighted matrix and a number of discussions to converge onto two potentially successful products.
The first was a passive noise cancelling in-ear device that would reduce ambient noise and quietly wake users with gentle vibration. The second was a flat flexible pillow insert that would detect a user’s level of sleep through biometric data (sound, temperature, etc.) and would silently wake the user without disturbing cohabitants.
The concept prototyping stage was accomplished in three stages. We built low-fidelity prototypes to determine the feasibility of our concepts. This consisted of rough ergonomic testing, as well as collecting user feedback in response to different stimulus methods. The earbud concept was bench tested by making ear cavity molds and adapting linear resonant actuators (LRA), or small vibrating motors, into foam earplugs. While these prototypes fit well in our ears, cancelled ambient noise, and provided effective stimulus, it was unanimously decided that a pair of earbuds tethered to the user would not be practical (or comfortable enough) for prolonged use.
Our second, mid-fidelity prototype consisted of a small solderable breadboard and ten vibrating motors known as LRAs in parallel connected to an analog-to-digital converter. This prototype was critical in determining the final device’s power requirements, choosing appropriate electrical hardware, and gauging how effective an array of LRAs are in waking a sleeping person. One of our teammates put the device under his napping roommate’s pillow and was able to wake him up seconds after turning it on.
Finally, my teammate and I built a high fidelity prototype our Silent Alarm Clock using an Arduino Uno, an LCD display, push buttons, along with LRAs, and a piezo speaker. All of the electronics are housed in a neoprene sleeve that is placed in the user’s pillow case and is plugged unto the wall beside them. The user sets a recurring alarm with a user interface on the front of the device.
This model features logic and a pressure plate to determine whether or not a user was sleeping on it (rudimentary biometric feedback). If the alarm detects a sleeping person, the LRAs will engage until it senses the person has gotten out of bed. If the user isn’t in contact with their pillow, the alarm instead would ring faintly but persistently until the user pressed on their pillow to indicate they had gotten up.
When volunteers tested our final prototype during a design showcase at the end of the semester, we received feedback from peers and mentors about our device and the design rationale behind it. Most seemed interested by the idea and saw its value compared to other types of alarms, while others were doubtful they would be able to wake up with vibration stimulus alone. Overall, we believe our alarm concept has potential in a market of sleep-valuing, technologically inclined college aged adults.
The Silent Alarm Clock is a device that is designed to be used independently from the user’s smartphone (though integration to a smart home network may be an avenue worth pursuing in future versions). Because of its simplicity and low cost, we decided the device should not pair with smart devices through bluetooth or WiFi. It’s reasonable to assume that for many of our college age interviewees that mentioned habitually using their smartphones before bed, screen time is standing in the way of sleep. Our alarm’s disconnected approach aims to dissuade using smartphones to set and manage alarms, in order to indirectly promote good before-bed habits.
