HoleBrain - The Better Barrier

Problem Statement: Due to the ongoing pandemic, plexiglass barriers are being used everywhere, from coffee shops to banks; essentially, anywhere with a counter that expects to deal with many customers. However, counters are a place where people must interact with each other to ensure a smooth transaction. Ordering coffee, depositing a check, building a pizza – all of these activities require people to communicate – most often verbally. The current plexiglass solutions do not allow sound to travel through very easily, especially in already noisy environments. As a result, both customers and employees can be frequently seen poking their heads around the plexiglass, touching the barrier, or shouting to communicate, putting each other in danger of spreading the virus. The current workarounds often negate the whole purpose of the plexiglass. So, how might we have effective verbal communication across a non-permeable, largely transparent barrier? Team: Atishay Saraogi, Dan Birmingham, Sherry Xue, Sandra Chiu

Final Prototype:

To start, we carried out user observations at various locations on campus to investigate and capture pain points in customer-employee interaction across existing COVID barriers. We also conducted several interviews to gather first-person anecdotes and gain deeper understanding of the issue.

Journey mapping:

Creating personas based on our observations and interviews:

Identifying needs and requirements for both users and performance side after analyzing our research:

Benchmarking existing solutions to find opportunity spaces:

Late-stage brainstorming and ideation:

Physical mockups of the concepts drawn above!

To test if our mockups performed technically better than our benchmark (plexiglass with no holes), we designed two experiments: the Decibel Test and the "Hey, Siri!" Test. The Decibel Test involved downloading a decibel app on our phone and using it to record the sound level on both sides of the barrier (we calculated the decibel drop by comparing the sound level from the speaker side to the listener side of the barrier for each mockup). The "Hey, Siri!" Test consisted of me saying "Hey Siri!" across each barrier ten times and recording how many times my phone responded to the key phrase. The results were very promising.

Next we performed user testing with random people to collect insights on how they feel about interacting with these different concepts. We devised a procedure to simulate a typical customer-employee interaction, and noted any significant observations as well as conducted a short interview after the conclusion of each test. The insights served as an important guide to improve certain features and select the final design.

Another concept we briefly explored:

Isometric views of 2 magnet mounting methods:

The winner was the hinge design:

Exploration of cellophane mounting methods—tension was directly related to how well audio transferred across the membrane, so it was key that we mounted the cellophane as taut as possible.

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