MyHearingAids – A New Approach for Hearing Aid Apps 🦻
A new approach
This time, we decided on a different approach. Instead of imagining and creating a concept of a brand-new app, we wanted to tackle an existing niche and see how we can improve on what’s already on the market.
The choice was simple — hearing aid apps are all the rage now, as Apple ventured into the industry with their AirPods Pro 2. Hearing Aids companies need to adapt and innovate to keep up in the game. After some research and competitive analysis, we worked on our take.
Three pillars of a great hearing aid app
Modern Hearing Aids are so much more than just ordinary medical devices. By accompanying them with a mobile app, the users gain access to features and control that wouldn’t be otherwise possible due to the devices’ form factor. But focus on adding features too much, and you’ll miss the mark. While additional possibilities are always welcomed, our research confirmed our suspicion that the key to designing a great hearing aid app is focusing on three areas:
Simplicity of use
Hearing Aids as a product has a very diverse user base, including people not proficient with the digital world; that’s why interactions should be straightforward, and the number of elements and controls on the screen kept at a minimum. A big part of the simplicity is providing enough support content, including onboarding, tutorials, and troubleshooting advice.
Accessibility
With such a diverse user base, it’s essential to design accessible interfaces with large fonts, sufficient contrast, and big interactive elements. That way, people with vision or motor impairments can still use the app to its full potential.
Smart features bringing real value
For hearing aids, the “companion” in the “companion app” is especially important. Due to the form factor, the aids themselves can’t fit a lot of buttons or dials, not to mention a display - and it’s only going to get worse as the devices get smaller. The app serves as a remote control but also an assistant: it reminds users to charge/change batteries, automatically adjusts to the environment, and enables remote fitting (adjusting Aid settings over the air without the need to go to an audio specialist).
The resulting design
So, following those guidelines led us to the designs you see in this shot.
The home screen isn’t cluttered, offering only the essential information and controls:
battery and connection status,
notifications,
sound profile (more on that later),
volume control (with the ability to set it separately for each Aid if needed),
and the headline feature: streaming.
This is already present in some of the apps on the market, but we believe this should be prominent in the app, as it allows the users to adapt and hear better in many situations. You can stream the audio from a TV, a microphone or speaker, or your phone’s microphone - directly to your Aids, which means much better quality, volume, and clarity.
Other sections of the app include Audio settings (sound equalizer, profile management, etc.), Health info (wearing time tracking), Support (essential content as described above), and Settings.
Contributors: Piotr Schmidtke, Miłka Cichosz, Somar Mahdi
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