The Event
As a Masters student of User Experience (UX) I was invited to participate in a full-day Design Jam hosted by Facebook.
Working alongside the Facebook Design team at their HQ in London we were divided into 9 teams of 6. Each group was given a different challenge to solve and at the end of the day we would have to present our solutions to the Facebook Product Design team and be judged.
The Challenge
We were all given the following brief: How might we design an experience that provides better control and transparency for data within your given app? Each group was then given a different app and persona to work on.
We were given an app called 'Ditto' — a companion app for a connected speaker system which includes a voice assistant that can be used to answer questions, control music and films; and can manage other connected devices.
Our team was given a family-based scenario. The persona was Jackie, a 44 year-old mother and her daughter Kate, was 14 years old.
Identifying the Problem
Within UX one of the key parts of our role when given any journey to design is to first identify 'what are the key problems we're trying to solve' — only then can we come up with a working solution.
My team and I identified two key problems:
Problem 1: Smart speakers do not differentiate between users: enabling all users equal access to the information that the smart speaker can access. Unlike other apps such as Netflix which allow Jackie to set different profiles to protect her daughter from seeing or hearing inappropriate material.
Problem 2: Privacy: Jackie is also uncomfortable knowing that the smart speaker has access to both their content such as (emails, Music, calendar) without any restrictions.
Our Solution
As a team we explored the personas, identified the pain points and then came up with the following ideas to solve the above problems.
Full Transparency
In order to solve problem 1 we agreed that full transparency would be the solution. To incorporate this concept into the design we suggested the following:
As part of the registration process to use the smart speaker, Jackie is intuitively guided into creating different profiles for her and her daughter under the same account. The setup process would use Voice recognition to differentiate the voice tone of different members, which means that only those members could activate the smart speaker with their voice. Jackie can set up the access to the content they are each entitled to hear. The app differentiates the tone of voice and can also detect if it's a recording. The content is tailored to each member based on the preferences Jackie set up.
Take Control
The issue of privacy rates highly as a concern for most people and we were keen to make certain that this concept had real meaning within our solution. We did so by ensuring that each user would be able to control their own privacy by turning 'on' or 'off' the privacy options for accessing their personal content such as music, movies, emails and chats. When it is on, the user will have some recommendations on their dashboard.
