4. Technology Levels, Headphone Design & the Future

VISUAL CONTEXT

Albert Einstein famously quoted “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This chapter is an attempt to act as the pillar of interrelating several aspects more deeply through self-explanatory graphical plots in the hopes that you can visually connect the vital concepts and find motivation to critically think when designing. This would not have been possible without the requisite knowledge discussed previously. Think of those as your first principles.

We now must connect those and make graphs, which instead shall represent the entire discussion effectively—this is analogous to a picture speaking a thousand words. It must be simple yet effective in transferring the information being expressed so that it is grasped the way it was aimed to be grasped.

We will be diving deep into these 3 areas visually:

• Technology Levels and their Saturation

• User Base Segmentation within Technology Level Spectrums

• Technology Advancement with Time

TECHNOLOGY LEVELS AND THEIR SATURATION

The graph shown demonstrates the relationship between Level of Technology and the % Saturation of Technology. However, before we look at the graph lets define some important terminologies:

Level of Technology: This represents new, better methods/technologies to solve the design problem. With each transition from Level 1 to 2, Level 2 to 3 and so on, we are increasingly moving towards a newer and effective technique of solving the root problem. It is inside these levels where the improvements (Continuous and 10X) are done. Note: Level 0 is different and will be discussed soon.

% Saturation of Technology: With more improvements being done in current technology, the lesser the improvement opportunities left, hence design/technology becomes more saturated. The more saturated it gets, the more you should be cautious of re-inventing the wheel and shift to new level of technology based on context.

As you can see, in Level 1 (straight horizontal line), there were continuous improvements being made (curved arrows) until a 10X improvement sparked huge innovation within it. From then on, things slowly became more saturated with a further slight improvement. Afterwards, it became clearly possible to shift to new technology, Level 2, where the new design solution is more effective in solving the root problem. In Level 2, this process repeats independently until a realization of a better means of solving this penetrates the scenario, so we go to Level 3…you get the idea.

Note that although each level operates in its own way independently to improve continuously and improve to innovate, the transition from one level to the other is dependent on the previous levels. This is because there is research and realizations made during each level such as what is deemed good, what is deemed bad, what works well, what does not work well, what users really want, what users think they want, what technology is there to support next level technology and how much R&D we have working on it and so on. These are the ingredients that pave path to allow for shifting to a newer design that can completely revolutionize the way the problem is solved. This is analogous to what in the business world is called “First Mover”. On the contrary once such movers make the new technology, other competitors jump on it fast and try to catch up and try to innovate within this field optimizing the solution. These guys are termed “Fast Followers.” Note that so long as you are enhancing user’s life by a large degree, regardless of being a First Mover or Fast Follower, you are onto something big…some great innovation.

In the graph, the connected arrow paths between the levels (e.g., 78-81% saturation in Level 1 connected to 6-9% saturation in Level 2) shows the relative position you were in Level 1 when you were able to shift to Level 2 and once you did so, what the stage of the theoretical % saturation was at that new level. This helps you realize two things:

(a)    You make better decisions regarding if you should be focused on improving current design further in Level 1 once you are at a high 80% technology saturation or perhaps innovate to new level.

(b)    Once in new technology Level 2 at around 10% technology saturation, you know how much competitive advantage and time you have before competitors innovate way more in this new field.

If you think these % technology saturation levels are very arbitrary, then you are not wrong. This is because sometimes when you are in a technology level, you may think “Surely, this can’t get any better!” For many years no one could figure out how to solve the lithium-ion battery issue. We thought that was the best that could be done. In that perspective, you may place yourself at very high % saturation of technology. However, Elon Musk came through and revolutionized the existing technology such that now it seems as if the previous situation was at best a minor % saturation of technology, instead of a high one as we previously imagined it to be. We will discuss more on how you should be judging the saturation of technology in future chapters.

For now, let’s shift our focus to Level 0. This is because Level 0 does not represent any technology, but instead the “problem statement” that we are trying to solve. It is Level 1 that brings the first sort of breakthrough in giving us an insight to a resolution of the persisting problem. To go from Level 0 to Level 1 takes the most effort and time. Treat it like the force overcoming the static friction which always has a relatively higher (static) coefficient of friction. On the contrary, the movements that occurs in Level 1 and when transitioning from Level 1 to Level 2 and so on could be thought of as overcoming kinetic friction, which has relatively lower (kinetic) coefficient of friction. This is because as you will see later, it takes a long time to transition from nothing to something that can solve the issue, but once started, each transition in something that solves the issue takes lesser and lesser in time to begin. This will revolve around the concept of how fast technology is growing.

To summarize and connect the dots regarding the graph, we need to realize that the entire graph drawn is representing the different, better technologies and their improvements within that technology level that aims to solve a particular problem.

Let’s take an example of Level 0—People travel by foot, and it is time consuming and ineffective for long distances. How can people travel faster and farther?

Level 0 to 1 could have been triggered by something like—Invention of wheels and axle.

This gave the start to Level 1 and within this level people made more improvements on manufacturing the wheels and came up with innovative wooden chariots connected to these wheels and axle while animals were pulling it to carry us. Things never looked better, but still it was not a consistent process. It was getting saturated and sought a new level of technology.

Shift from Level 1 to Level 2 occurred when the first automobiles came out, allowing people to move even faster and farther, essentially solving the problem in a different, better way. But people could not travel even larger distances across large seas to other countries in short time (ships, if considered were slow).

Shift from Level 1 to Level 2 occurred when the first planes were developed, giving us the chance today to travel New York to London in under 7 hours. People work 8 hours a day and you can cross the Atlantic Ocean less than that time frame to meet someone at a different continent in the same day. A travel with automobiles would have been impossible!

People want to explore more than just the earth so Level 2 to Level 3 transition took place via rockets that would take us to space, then moon and hopefully Mars someday. A feat unimaginable with any other previous level of technology. It for sure as hell does go fast and far!

But you see, just because a technology solves the root problem better (going fast and far) it does not mean that once we shift to new technology, we will completely forget the previous one! As you will see, it matters on the context of where the technology is to be used; majority of users are on earth and need to travel close by most of the time, so for that reason we will still have to make cars the most! It would be unfeasible if we made more rockets to solve that contextual aspect…or we will see in future.

The graph merely represents the different, better technologies that can be enabled because of previous technologies reaching their own saturation that gave us important lessons and time to create the new revolutionary technologies.

Whether or not you will be designing/working on the new technology level or the previous one depends on the entire context behind the users you are solving the problem for! The Level 0 root problem in this case was very general and of course all the Levels 1, 2 and 3 do solve it, but which one does it better for your users?

USER BASE SEGMENTATION WITHIN TECHNOLOGY LEVEL SPECTRUMS

In real life, our Level 0 will be a bit more nuanced, so that scope is well defined. By scope I mean the potential paths that can be taken to realistically solve the design problem given the limited time, physical and financial resources, design requirements and constraints from client, etc.

When your scope is broad, you have large number of potential design paths to start with but if your scope is narrow, you have a small set of potential paths to start with. For instance, if a client comes to you and states, “I want you to make a patio umbrella that opens and closes fast”, you have multiple paths you can take to make one, by that I mean you can already imagine so many alternative designs in your mind that could do that and maybe exceed expectations in other areas of it. However, this poses a dilemma in decision making. The scope is set as if you can benchmark patio umbrellas and record the time taken to open/close it and check the method used to do so, after which you come back and make a very elite mechanism that integrates with a sleek patio umbrella to open/close it fast, faster, or the fastest anyone could deem possible. There is no limit to what you are making. There is no effective goal in play.

You can end up with a design that really is next level technique/technology that if you push a button on the pole of the patio umbrella, it automatically opens and closes the umbrella as required. Current ones took about 20 seconds to open since you had to hand crank it, but your design does it in 5 seconds once a button is pressed. You made a 4x improvement, woohoo! The problem is it costs 5x more than benchmarks, being electrical poses problems with rain any moment, or maybe being pneumatic has more moving parts than previous one making it more complicated to use, but hey, you got the design problem solved—you did make it very fast. Then…what’s the issue? The issue is you never focused on a critical element that should be considered to refine the scope and make it more useful and that is: Who are the users of your design?

I believe I have repeated this statement before, but I will say it again: Afterall, it is for them that we are making the products and not only us. You should know by now that this is a serious cornerstone of design—to think about the users for whom you are designing the product for.

The client and you need to refine the scope down from a highly broad one to a narrower, realistic, and impactful one. You ask, “Whom are we making this for? Who is our target market?”

This makes your design problem more ‘user design centric’, which is the effective goal that needs to be in play.

Unless it is the client himself who wants one to use for himself and loves the sleek, fast high tech one and will pay you for it regardless of price (which often is not the case), then sure… make that 4x improved one. But generally, a client gives a problem statement to solve the problems for other people.

Your client may respond to your question by, “We want to make it for the elderly.”

That clearly narrows your design solutions to cater towards making a fast open/closing system for the umbrella specific to elderly people. This is much more useful information than before because:

• You might have had 15 ideas before but now you don’t have to juggle with all but focus on maybe 3 of those ideas which is more manageable.

• You know who will use it, so to create an effective design, we just need to know more about them, their pain points, how they use current designs, what improvements they seek knowing and unknowingly and work our way towards how our design can benefit them substantially. A lot of the work is done if we can properly understand and convert their pain into pleasure.

• You save more time on decision making and base it upon not what the client thinks the problem is but what the problem is from a user’s standpoint and how by thinking from first principles you can create a solution that meets or exceeds user expectations. This is important since client assumes users just need a fast system since they are old and cannot hand crank for a long 20 seconds, but do they really? Therefore, it is key to have a starting point of research and crucial user interviews to challenge our assumptions and improve our requirements based on user needs. Maybe how fast umbrellas open/close isn’t really a big deal to them and maybe they just prioritized having a hand crank at waist level, so they did not have to stand up and hand crank. What would be the point of our design had we not understood our users?

All the points above beg us to dive deeper into the sort of technology levels you will go through or choose to solve your user specific problems based on a refined scope. Once you get the understanding of the design problem and who the users are you may want to start taking some of the following steps:

STEP 1: Find out the relevant top 2-3 levels of technology which solve the main root problem.

STEP 2: Conduct research, target market and/or current user interview to:

(a)    Figure out the percentage of target market in each of the technology levels and/or mixture of the levels.

(b)    Characterize all the target market into 3-5 segmentation types as deemed necessary based on their persona.

(c)    Understand which segmentation type within the technology levels and/or mixtures of the levels your target market or current users lie on.

(d)    Figure out essential pain points from your target market or current user’s unbiased perspective (where applicable).

STEP 3: Connect the dots to find if 10X improvement in target market/user’s current scenario is desired or if a shift to new/unrealized existing level is more appropriate for them. This is heavily influenced by the scope again.

STEP 4: Execute on effective path and iterate with the involvement of user feedback.

I will now explain the steps mentioned above via a Venn Diagram and Graphical Plot. But we will learn to do so by examining a fictional design problem first and following the steps above to figure out the relationship, so we learn on the go and generate the crucial graphs. That graph instead will speak a thousand words based on which we take further actions.

Imagine you work at Sennheiser as a product designer or engineer (could be analogous to industrial designer/engineer). Sennheiser is a German private company that designs and manufactures microphones, headphones, aviation headset for personal, professional, and business needs. The product manager informed you of the following problem:

Our wireless headphone model X which is aimed at university students for mainly its stylish features is not getting enough sales. What can be done in the next model so we can meet our revenue goals?

Right off the bat. Pretty straightforward.

We start off thinking about the top 2-3 technology levels which adhere to solving the root problem, that is what are the other technologies like “wireless headphone” out there which the target market (university students) uses for “listening to audio confined only to user”.

When the product manager made the statement, it is the assumption that perhaps it is due to design flaw and not marketing’s incapability which is causing the drawback in sales. By design flaw, I mean if your targeted users are students and you think having stylish features in your wireless headphones would attract more sales from them and you are not getting it, then maybe some of the following, if not all, may be true:

• Your vision of “stylish features” may not have been so stylish from university students’ perspective.

• The university students are fine with style, but they really want something else out of those products (wireless headphones) even more.

• The design itself has unintended consequences generated (discomfort, complicacy, etc.) by largely focusing on making it just stylish.

• The university student target market may be purchasing more of other level of technologies than wireless headphones itself! Maybe it is not the design flaw within wireless headphones but that students who look for “style” may choose to use other means of technology than wireless headphones, hence they are not buying that model enough.

As you can see, so many user-based questions come through and needs to be boiled down to figure out the true root cause and evaluate design decisions from there. We will use the following Venn Diagram to understand the entire spectrum of technology ranges and the relative target market usage in each case. From this research/target market interview, we will develop segmentation types based on their persona and form a graphical plot that will enable us to understand what position our current users lie in the huge spectrum giving us an idea of what they may want. With these ideas in mind, we will then conduct interviews with our current users of wireless headphone model X and figure out what their actual pain points are. We will then combine that information to create a better design fit for our target market (university students) and/or for current users (may not be only students).

Applying STEP 1:

We figured out from research that there are potentially 3 levels of technology our target market, i.e., university students age ranging 18-24 deal with:

Applying STEP 2:

You conducted research or a target market interview with say 100 university students (may/ may not include your current users) and wanted to figure out which levels of technology they used and why. You may notice students will overlap in the technologies since some may use both or all.

Hence, Venn Diagrams are key in showing the data of target market that we obtained:

As can be seen, out of 100 university students, who were out target market:

14 used only wired headphones, 24 used only wireless headphones, 28 used only wireless earbuds, 8 used both wired and wireless headphones but not wireless earbuds, 6 used both wired headphones and wireless earbuds but not wireless headphones, 16 used both wireless headphones and earbuds but not wired headphones and only 4 used all three types of technology.

This gives us an idea of comparative usage of main technological levels among your target market—university students. You are seeing how many in general use wired headphones, wireless headphones and wireless earbuds which all solve the root problem of “listening to audio confined only to user”, but each level solves a major problem. For instance, wireless headphone solves the problem in wired headphones by allowing you to move distances away from phone/laptop while using it; wireless earbud solves the problem in wireless headphones being small and light weight.

We can understand that there are 7 components in Venn Diagram since 3 circles all intersecting creates those 7 sections. We shall call these 7 sections the ‘Technology Level Spectrums’. These are all the possible ways your target market can be categorized in terms of their reliance and day to day usage on the type of technologies that solves their problems. Now this is interesting, since maybe the student who uses only wired headphone has different values, perceptions, use case than those who use only wireless headphones or wireless earbuds. Therefore, it is important to engage in an open-ended question interview to learn about their user persona.

In this case while conversating we found 3 different segmentations that will describe the user personas among all the university students using the technology levels we discussed. The user persona segmentations (with their description) that were found are:

• Functionality Driven—happy with basic functions, does not care too much about design, dislikes the idea of charging, cautious of price

• Performance Seeker—desires great sound quality, wants fast charge, listens to a lot of music and podcasts, appreciates a good design, wants good investment

• Portability Focused—craves comfort and ease to carry, works out while listening to music, loves a sleek design, wants a fair price     

You had to have found the distribution of these 3 personas within the 14 people who only use wired headphones, 24 people who only use wireless headphones, 28 people who only use wireless earbuds and so on.

If you do so and plot both the information obtained from Venn Diagram and the User Persona decoded from your research/interview, you arrive at this beautiful graph with Percentage of Users in y-axis VS Technology Level Spectrums in x-axis:

This graph shows a stacked column data which means it shows not only the % of our target market which are distributed in 7 sections (shown in descending order), but also the % of the 3 kinds of user personas that make up each of those 7 sections. This is brilliant, isn’t it?

What this does is it tells us that there are basically students who are of three kinds and based on certain specific needs they may opt to purchase one type of technology than the other or even have both or all three.

The takeaway is in the coloured regions in the graph. If you look closely, you will make some observations that MAJORITY of:

• ‘Functionality Driven’ users used ‘Wired Headphones’ only.

• ‘Performance Seeker’ users used ‘Wireless Headphones’ only.

• ‘Portability Focused’ users used ‘Wireless Earbuds’ only.

Additionally, you can tally up all the 3 kinds of user personas by their respective percentages and you find:

You can see that 22% of target market were functionality driven, 45% were performance seekers and 33% were portability focused.

Both these graphs help us in understanding two important things:

• Majority of university students involved in these technologies are Performance Seekers.

• Majority of Performance Seekers use Wireless Headphones.

This helps us in deconstructing that we are in the right market since we did make wireless headphones by targeting (majority of) the university students, but we made the wrong product since we failed to realize that majority of them were ‘performance seeker’ and not necessarily driven by style. Sure, who does not like good style and in fact it was a common element every user expected, but maybe focusing on only style was a problem and maybe we should iterate back on the sound quality engineering aspects more than putting effort to make design better, since surely design itself is good. Or is it?

This is when interviewing your current users is key (if it is applicable). Now, our current users are users of our specific model X wireless headphones and not our target market. They, therefore, include all sorts of people perhaps whom we did not intend to make headphone for initially, but we need their input. This is because, at this point, we want to learn what they think about our design. We will be fishing for some sound quality comments without directly biasing their inputs.

After conducting interview with 20 users, you ended up with the following main highlights:

• Despite being an over-ear headphone, it was giving comfort issues/putting high stress on the ear.

• The bass sound was not hitting as good as competitors’ wireless headphones

You understood that majority of all problems from current users circled around these points and NOT about your design aesthetics/style being poor. In fact, because of some overlook in material selection for the foam it gave off discomfort to ears with usage within 30 mins, which becomes an engineering problem to solve, but design and looks wise everyone said it is fine. On the other aspect which we kind of fished for already was the sound issue, mainly bass sound was not so good, and this is exactly what maybe majority of university students look for since they listen to a lot of music, watch films and lectures, but our product just does not help.

Applying STEP 3:

By now, you have a sense as to what paths could be taken to solve the problem.

You have an understanding that you can emphasize on sound quality engineering and provide more comfort in design to ensure your chosen target market, university students, start using your product more than before. Also, this provides insight that it should not be branded for only showing off style but by exhibiting performance with complementary design. This means that when next model comes through, it will NOT be marketed and known for only its ‘stylish features’ but as ‘bass blaster’, so most of our target market knows we are serious this time.

Another aspect is if we are trying to convert the Level 3 wireless earbuds users towards this technology, we can try to innovate in making our headphones light or even to convert Level 1 wired headphones users by making its price lucratively cheaper.

We can even try to focus on a different target market and see if current design with only comfort improved can be targeted towards a group that loves more “sleek design and comfort in wireless headphones and does not care too much about sound performance.”

However, after a lot of consideration with product manager involved as well, you choose to make significant improvement on making only sound quality excellent while carefully selecting right materials for comfort to ears—aiming at majority of the current target market, university students who seek performance.

Applying STEP 4:

The task is now to finalize with product manager and team what the solution is exactly and how it will be designed, manufactured till full scale production.

If all deemed good, then the work will be progressing towards improving on sound engineering by large factors while design for comfort is made better.

Once your prototype (or MVP) has been created, user feedback could be crucial before product release to market, to see if we are on the right track. The current users can be brought in for testing and if they realize a great positive change from previous design, then you know you are ready for final testing and releasing product to market. If still some situations are encountered, then design needs to be iterated until optimal level. This time though the design needs to speak “sound performance” more than just “style” so we attract the desired target market when branding.

Once product released, we wait to see what results come by and if we have acquired students, retained their usage of our new product, and get them to refer to others as well, increasing more sales in the desired market.

It has been 8 weeks since product release. You observe that customer levels increased 3x than expected and 75% of those purchasers were in fact university students, indicating that our product was correctly designed, engineered, and manufactured for our target market.

TECHNOLOGY ADVANCEMENT WITH TIME

Most of human history passed in the Stone Age from 2 million BCE to 3300 BCE (that is around 1,996,700 years). Then, 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE was the Bronze Age (lasted around 2100 years). 1200 BCE to 600 BCE was the Iron Age (was around for 600 years). Do you see the disproportionate number of years each stage lasted?

Next, the world entered the Classical Antiquity and Middle Ages where ~2000 years go by (600 BCE to 1500 CE) to with little to no technological advancement at all. In this timeframe, Roman Empire had begun and ended, Western Europe entered the Dark Ages which shifted the lifestyle paradigm negatively, Genghis Khan had taken 40 million lives, and the bubonic plague Black Death was responsible for wiping out at least a third of Europe.

However, something remarkable was happening as that age was coming to an end. After the invention of Gutenberg printing press in 1450, the cultural movement of humanism at that time (idea that man was the center of his own universe and that people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature, and science) fleshed into the broader community, influencing what would be the start of Renaissance ideas during 15th century which spread from Italy to France and then throughout western and northern Europe. Some of the most well-known names in that era are Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, William Shakespeare, Rene Descartes, Dante, and Michelangelo to name a few.  

But the real progress in human lives began with the British Industrial Revolution during 1780s.

As can be seen in the graph below, there seems to have been a remarkable and quite radical change in human lifestyle over the course of 1000 BCE till date. There was a boom in life expectancy, GDP, % not living in extreme poverty, energy capture, war-making capacity and % living in a democracy from around the time British Industrial Revolution began.

To take things into perspective, estimates suggest that in a pre-modern, poor world, life expectancy was around 30 years in all regions of the world. Since early 19th century, the global average life expectancy has increased more than twice and is now above 70 years. Think of being able to ‘create’ 40 more years in a lifespan with innovative methods and technologies.

Not only that, in around 1820 the percentage of people living in extreme poverty to those who were not in extreme poverty was roughly 90%:10% respectively. Fast forward 2 centuries later, that ratio flipped to around 10%:90%.

Let’s focus on the idea of technology levels. What problem statement did the Industrial Revolution solve?

In this case it is a very broad one, but very simple:

The global standard of living is poor. Create a sustainable industrial framework that maximizes the physical and mental well being of the majority while minimizing human effort.

This problem has been solved and is still being solved through what are now known as the first, second, third and fourth industrial revolutions (Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0) as shown in figure below.

We can think of these as the four levels of technology which all aim to solve the root problem of poor living standards, with each level up being dependent on the successes of the previous and providing more advanced ways to enrich lifestyle.

Level 1- Mass extraction of coal to utilize steam engines for mechanized power generation, speeding up manufacturing of railroad that accelerated the economy.

Level 2- Using oil, gas and electrical energy as power source and ramping production speed at low costs with assembly line, bringing the world internal combustion engine driven automobiles and planes.

Level 3- Untapping nuclear energy, automating systems partially with electronics via robots and programmable logic controllers alongside the rise of telecommunications and computers.

Level 4- Focusing on renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal to power the world and connecting mass majority via the internet enabling real-time transfer of information and creating a virtual world merged with the physical world.

The essence of this discussion is to display where we as a civilization currently are and how we arrived at this point. It is important as a product designer and engineer to know the past since it humbles them (as it should) seeing such high level of design and innovation coming from legendary figures that changed the world just a few years back and it is up to us to do something meaningful now. Does not sound like an easy task. That is not to say you should undergo imposter syndrome, but you should extract, decipher, and internalize lessons befitting your case and keep it in your toolbox for designing products, kind of like your first principles. You will for sure be needing them if you are on the path to innovate.

We go deep into the process and techniques to innovate your products from the next articles. See you there!