Product Designer & User Experience Professional

Description

Our team designed a portable music player for moms to be used at and away from home. Through a rigorous design process, we identified the emotional and musical needs of mothers spanning a wide age range. We then created a prototype to demonstrate how these needs could be met through innovative interactions with a portable music player.

Approach

Research - In order to design a portable music player for moms, we first tried to understand what it means to be a mother. We utilized a variety of methods to understand moms and their needs in relationship to music, including interviews, media research, and competitive analysis of existing products targeting mothers.

Synthesis - As a summary of our research, we identified many different aspects about what it means to be a mother and the different uses/motivations they have for listening to music. These themes helped us develop our concept scenarios, which we validated with moms, and then redefined our focus for our final concept.

With all of the data we gathered from our concept validation sessions, we needed to come up with an idea that allowed a mom and child to share music together. We explored ideas of active and passive sharing. Our ideation process shows several of the ideas we considered for our design. We then developed our physical prototype and created a video storyboard to use as our guide in taking pictures and recording the audio for the final video sketch.

Solution

Squez is a portable music player designed for mothers to help them maintain and strengthen bonds with their children. Squez allows mothers and their children to share music with each other and introduces music as a form of communication. It allows mothers to stay current in their children's lives and enables the ability to create new memories. The physical design of Squez enables portability with its size and affords squeezing as the main interaction.