
Smart Jewelry
Changing the role of jewelry
Introduction to the Project
PROJECT SUMMARY
The Smart Jewelry project took place during the Hackathon Hack@Night 2017 in Munich, initiated by Swarovski, an Austrian company known for its crystal jewelry. The design brief was to create a concept for smart jewelry that could provide feedback on vital data while being invisible and natural, informing without demanding focus or attention, and reducing interactions with smartphones.
King’s Speech is a smart bracelet designed to enhance presentation skills by serving as an invisible speech coach. It provides feedback on stress levels during presentations and informs the user if their speech is too fast, slow, or monotonous through specific vibration patterns and color changes. This innovative, calm interface improves the presentation skills of business professionals. My role involved researching, conceptualizing, and designing the product while working in a small interdisciplinary team of software developers and designers.
PROBLEM
Information technology often disrupts calmness with constant notifications from smartphones, the internet, TV, and radio. This project sought to address how many notifications are truly needed, how and when they should be displayed, and whether technology can be made more human and calming.
SOLUTION
With a calm tech approach, we aimed to create a smart bracelet that:
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Requires less attention, reducing stress and disturbances
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Communicates without speaking
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Uses different senses to convey information
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Reduces smartphone interactions
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Is perceived as natural, calm, and invisible
TOOLS
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Adobe Photoshop, Justinmind
Introduction to the Project
What we learned
ABOUT THE CUSTOMERS
During the user research, we interviewed 15 potential users to identify their needs, motivations, wishes, and problems. We learned that our potential users:
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Are young professionals
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Primarily male
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Aged between 25 and 35
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Tech-savvy
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Have to make presentations at work at least twice a week
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Despite much preparation, get nervous, get stuck, or speak too fast during presentations
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Don’t trust personal coaches
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Are sometimes confused about their presentation skills and don’t know how to overcome their problems
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Wish for a wearable device that can improve their speaking skills and track their progress
Workflow

They wish they could have
an invisible speech coach,
that can bring their speaking skills to the next level.
So, we created a concept of
a smart bracelet “King’s Speech”…

Speech Analytics App

Speech analytics app allows you to
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record your speech during the presentation,
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see the daily, monthly & yearly overview,
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track your speed & intonation,
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train speaking in your free time,
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& improve your overall speaking skills!

It also has a gamification effect that lets you
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see the overview of your best speaking results,
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collect the points,
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track the success,
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get recommendations on improving speaking skills,
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add friends,
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& share your success with your friends.
Conclusion
WHAT I LEARNED
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You can have the best ideas in the world, but only when validated during tests with potential users, the idea can be proven to work or not.
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I learned that paper prototyping can significantly reduce the time to create new visions and ideas to be tested, validated, and developed.
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That was also a valuable experience to work in a multidisciplinary team and to find compromises considering the points of view of all participants.
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I also learned that under the time pressure, you may generate very creative ideas.
CHALLENGE
The most challenging thing about this project was the limited time for each part of the process. So, instead of creating a lot of features, I focused on the main points.