Client Overview

GN ReSound is one of the top hearing aid manufacturers in the world; Interton, Beltone, and ReSound are different brands that are owned by GN ReSound, a subsidiary of GN Great Nordic. Visde was engaged to design and develop a new product that is used by audiologists around the globe to fit and adjust the hearing instruments prescribed for their patients.

Business Challenges and Requirements

A significant portion of audiologist's interaction with the patient and his or her family is counseling about the hearing loss and how it affects their lives. GN ReSound was lacking a comprehensive tool that helped the doctors communicate with their patients, the causes, lifestyle decisions, and solutions. With our skill in human centered design and research, GN ReSound approached Visde to help them create this software application. For this particular project, we teamed up with audiologists, engineering, product and marketing teams and then applied user-centered methods to deliver an easy to use and fulfilling product.

Our Design/Solution

The Discover phase of the process included the gathering of business requirements, domain research, competitive analysis, interviews with key stakeholders and knowledge domain experts; user research included contextual inquiries, site visits, user interviews, observations, survey, workflow mapping, and a card sort exercise with users. Once a good understanding of what the users needs are, our team of interaction, visual, and technical development brainstormed about the possible approaches and design solutions. Many of our sessions included rough sketches, workflow diagrams on the whiteboard, task analysis - and many post it notes. With plenty of ideas, we worked with business and users to iterate and provide feedback. The Design phase included refining ideas and creating more professional and substantial designs. Visde created personas, storyboards, scenarios, and use cases. The Visde interaction design team concentrated on the overall user's interaction, including the user interface and thought processes expressed through wireframes and workflows. In parallel, Visde worked with marketing to develop ideas for visual design approaches, branding, identity and overall mood, tone and style of the product. Prototypes were then developed for facilitating feedback from users. After another round of feedback from stakeholders and users, the product was refined and finalized. Given the user base and the purpose of the software, we selected Flash as the technology to develop this desktop application. The advantages of Flash were the flexibility and ease of use in creating rich interactions, as well as the ability to develop it in short amount of time than it would traditionally take with standard set of programming tools.

Benefits and Results

The final application is successfully used in over 10 countries around the world.