People insight is our starting point
“We want to keep learning, find new ways to do things better and bring the best solutions to market.”
To fulfil this ambition, we must learn and understand all we can about people and their needs.
Hearing and communication involves far more than ears and auditory perception. It is about people. For this reason, we are in constant dialogue with users, listening to their personal and professional challenges; and with hearing care professionals, who are a vital link in achieving user satisfaction on all parameters.
At our international research centre Eriksholm, at our headquarters and sales organisations, we bring together scientists, anthropologists, hearing care professionals, users and their families, to increase understanding and identify new areas of research and development – and we constantly make new discoveries about users’ expectations, needs and social interaction in daily life.
These discoveries are the foundation of everything we do, and across the world, our findings are incorporated into training seminars, student camps and conferences to provide knowledge sharing about the latest advances.
We carry out ethnographic studies on an on-going basis. The purpose of using ethnography is to discover and describe user behaviour and needs. The findings are used to help us develop the ultimate hearing solutions.
Insight into end-users and their needs is the cornerstone of our holistic approach to developing the ultimate hearing solutions. We use questionnaires, interviews, participant observation and spend time with hearing impaired people. These ethnographical studies give us a deep insight into users’ daily lives, their challenges, their needs and emotions. For example, we can learn about the challenges they encounter in social situations like family gatherings, when shopping or taking part in meetings or sports activities.
We also enter into dialogue with people from the user’s family, and social and professional network. This could be the spouse, relatives, friends or colleagues – people whose lives are also influenced by the consequences of the user’s hearing loss. Our research is additionally enriched with studies carried out among hearing care professionals in order to get a deeper insight into their interaction with the users. The objective of our studies is clear: to explore and understand the real issues experienced by end-users and their families, so we can address them directly.
Based on the knowledge and insight our research provides, we develop user profiles and patterns. These help ensure that our hearing solutions clearly address specific user needs.
Our ethnographic research provides insight into user needs, emotions and expectations. In order to make use of this valuable information, we identify and framework similarities and significant patterns in the research material.
From these patterns and frameworks, which we continuously enrich and advance, we have developed a common understanding of end-users and their different needs that enable us to fully address these needs in our short- and long-term development of future hearing solutions.
In the quest for better hearing solutions, we always work with a wide range of ideas, drafts, models and prototypes. These are tested on end-users – and if they do not meet with user approval, we go back to the drawing board.
Analyzing data from end-user interviews and research often results in a wealth of ideas about how we can further empower people in need of hearing support. From this pool of ideas, we select the most promising proposals and develop models and prototypes for new hearing solutions.
To find out whether these solutions make a difference and meet the needs of the users, we consult them. We observe how they use the prototypes and ask them if they like the solution, if they understand its functionality, and if it improves their lives. If not, we go back to the drawing board, implement the suggested changes and repeat the process. This user-oriented approach is an integral part of our work in developing solutions within technology, audiology, fitting, counselling and business support.
Understanding end-users and their needs requires insight into the counselling and fitting consultation. At our headquarters and out in the field at actual consultations, we observe how users and hearing care professionals interact during the fitting process.
At our headquarters, we have established a number of audiological clinics, where we carry out counselling and fitting sessions. Here we test the functionality and user-friendliness of products and counselling and fitting tools. We observe the fitting process in order to identify users’ different needs and identify which tools hearing care professionals need to give them optimal support in the counselling and fitting process.
We also research out in the field. A recent project took us around the world to hearing care practices, in a quest to fully understand the environment in which our hearing care professionals operate. Through interviews, videos and ’fly-on-the-wall’ observations of real-life fittings, we gained valuable insight into the hearing care professionals’ working day and the challenges they encounter. This insight empowers us to optimize the tools and guidance we provide to support hearing care professionals in their dialogue with users, and to help make fitting quicker and easier.
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