Since participants were unfamiliar with the device, interviews were chosen to allow us to probe further on initial reactions, actions, or questions that surfaced. Surveys were also incredibly useful in allowing us to quantify reactions across participants.
Being that we lacked the resources for an actual sleep study, and had only one pair of the Sleepbuds, scenarios were employed to help situate the user in an actual use case. A script was used to maintain interviewer consistency between participants.
Given the uniqueness of this product, we sought users who had never used them as this was the most common experience. They also had to live in environments that were less than ideal for uninterrupted sleep.
University students were a clear fit as most still live communally and likely have not used this product before. Seven participants from the University of Washington were recruited for the usability study.
Video recordings of the sessions were also captured for reference at a later time. All participant information was kept strictly anonymous. With limited time to go through all our scenarios, we decided to pre-download the Bose app for our participants.
As we had a short amount of time to code a lot of data, affinity mapping was done to identify emergent themes.
We were provided a severity scale as a reference by the Bose team. Adapting that severity scale, we were able to create a scale of our own based on the frequency and inconvenience observed in our testing.
Insufficient affordance on the case lead to confusion on how to even open the case. This early obstacle fosterd negative emotion for later steps.
Due to different mental models, there was a variety of actions taken to pair the device. A lack of notice about successful pairing contributed to the challenges and an inability to identify Left and Right side also further impacted the experience.
Charging and battery indicators lacked clarity for participant. The instruction manuals did not consistently provide the necessary information to help participants recover from errors.