Redesigning Google Home

for socially responsible calmness

Roles: User Experience Researcher, Interaction Designer,

Human Center Design Researcher

Team: Wessel Ammerlaan,

Gabriela Mitrana, Jordi Weldink, Savio Menifer,

Noha Mokhtar Al-Moshneb, Sara Polak, Blerina Beqiraj

Timeline: 3 Months - Human Centered Design

Supervisor: Cristina Zaga

Credits: Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Understand and Reflect

Doing our research

We researched the device interaction with participants varying in age, gender and diverse backgrounds, and finally came to 2 observations:

Commands are usually given in sequences and the device is mostly used in short sessions throughout the day. Typically, the sessions involved multiple usage domains, the most frequent ones referring to home automation or music.
The research revealed the use of the device matched the rhythm of a person’s day, showing how different domains are more or less relevant at different hours.
People communicated with the device through short commands and the average command length did not change over time. However, users frequently chose different manners for asking the same specific information

Challenge Brainstorm

Single Mode Communication

exclusion of special users such as people with accents or kids

Impersonal Responses

No differentiation between owner and stranger in the house

privacy

Microphone always on

Target Group

Young adults, elderly, disabled people, families, children

Interviews

2 participants

1 male - 1 female

average age 22

Interviews Findings

Common Functionalities

Music

Weather

Alarm

Unexpected findings

Games

Audio Book

Communication problems

Different Accents

Our personas

Ideate & create

Explorative Scenarios

The main problem that emerged from the interviews was related to communication. One of the interviewees indicated that the device did not always understand them, which led to frustrations from time to time. Other than this, there seemed to be little problems with regard to the use of the smart speaker. We expect one of the reasons for this that we interviewed the “ideal user”. The interviewees were around 20 years old and have grown up with digital devices all around them, which makes these devices’ use relatively intuitive. Since communication appeared to be a problem, even for them, we tried to explore this problem in a broader sense in our scenarios.

The first scenario was explored from the view of a child, around 5 years old, that is part of a family that owns a Google Home (or similar) device. The child has noticed that there is a new digital device in the home to which the parents talk, so the child wants to try this out as well and might even try to move it. However, the device cannot communicate with the child. It doesn’t always recognize the high-pitched voice of the child and cannot make sense of the sentences that sometimes lack structure. This leaves the child disappointed that (s)he cannot play a game with the device or even talk to it.

The other scenario was explored from the view of an elderly person that has practically no experience with digital or electronic devices. They have heard about the ‘amazing’ Google Home device that their son has purchased, shown in the home environment in Figure 8, and as they are getting a bit lonely, such a friend in the house doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But, when they get to try out the device, it doesn’t hear them well enough, as they probably do not speak loud enough. If it does start talking, the elderly person does not understand where this new person is suddenly coming from. Questions arise such as ‘Is it inside the device?’ and ‘How does it know the answer to my questions?’ The interaction might on the one hand not be intuitive enough for a totally new user but at the same time too intuitive here as elderly people do not understand how the communication with the device has emerged.

Experiential prototyping

As we decided to focus our design perspective on improving communication and personalizing the device’s responses depending on the context, the first version of our low-fidelity prototype was built to reflect this mindset. Thus, the ‘personality’ of our model changes when it is interacting with children or adults.

To visualize this idea, our first prototype consists of a simple body (a play doh cup) which we customized using legos (to replace the LEDs) in order to resemble more the actual device, as displayed in the leftmost picture. To show that the device can change its operating mode while interacting with different categories of people, we used post-its. For example, the pink post-it signifies that the device is interacting with a kid, while the blue one implies a communication with an adult.

For the second version of our prototype we changed the physical aspect of the device in order to make it more suitable for children. Accordingly, we split the device into a stationary part and a removable one that contains some minimal functionalities such as the microphone and speaker. In our perception, this will facilitate the interaction with youths as they can perceive the detachable part of the device as a companion that joins them while doing their daily tasks or recreational activities, as shown in the middle picture

The third version of the prototype, as shown in the rightmost, replicates the ideas of the second version. However, we used a body that mimics the real device so we can later reproduce a more real life-like experience. We added a red detachable part to it to understand how the changed device will work and ultimately to simulate some scenarios.

Interaction Scenario

In the “Understand and Reflect Phase”, we explored different scenarios including young and old users that might experience more communication problems than the ‘ideal user’ so far experienced. Based on our design vision, we have prototyped the device to be directed at children using the device.

In this interaction scenario, the Google Home device is part of a family home, including kids. There already exist some constraints on the usage of the device for kids. However, with our prototype the device will turn into a full-on kids mode. The device will recognize that a child is talking. The device now switches to kids mode, with an increased agency, and starts talking to the kid with more enthusiasm and simpler sentences than it uses in ‘regular mode’. Next to this, the device has been made more flexible, as shown in the prototypes. The child can carry part of the device with them when they want to e.g. play with it. This gives the child the experience of a new friend that is able to move with them throughout the house. To prevent unwanted situations from happening, this detachable part will be adjusted to child use. For example, the detachable part will only work within the WiFi range of the home, it will be of a softer material so that it doesn’t break itself or other things when the kid plays with it, and it will have restrictions on what it does or says in the kids mode to prevent inappropriate behavior from happening.

In the pictures some more specific examples of possible interactions between the device (on the right) and the child (on the left) are provided. The first scenario shows the kids mode where the device becomes more interactive and fun. The second scenario is an example of a situation where the child actually takes part of the device with him when he goes to play with his legos somewhere else in the house.

Reframed Design Vision

Final Prototype

Evaluate & Communicate

Participants

6 males & 4 females

Different background & majors

Within subject design

Setup & Experiment

Detachable Part of Google Home

The walkthrough is a roleplay scenario where the participants are asked to perform three tasks in a house set-up. The room setup was done as in the figure below (see figure 19) to represent a small apartment. The participant starts in the bedroom.

They are requested to perform 3 tasks:

Play music in the living room
Set a ten minute alarm while cooking in the kitchen
Go back and arrange the living room since it is messy

The intention behind this task is to see if people would take the ball everywhere with them or take the whole device or will not take it at all. The participants are informed that the redesign includes a detachable part that performs similarly to the immobile part of Google Home (both similar to the original product).

Kids Mode

1.mp4

2.mp4

3.mp4

The second scenario was tackling the kids mode included in the redesign. A brief introduction about the kids mode and the addition of the feature that allows kids to interact with Google Home was given. The participants watched videos that included interaction scenarios with the device:

The device entertains the kid in a way that it asks him riddles.
The device suggest some tips during playing with lego
Parental control switched on and the kid is unable to detach the detachable part.

The videos were shown in a different, random, order to each participant to lessen the predictability and shows iterations to avoid unintended order in a specific order.

Results

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