The main objective of this project was essentially understanding gamers' use of sound when they play games, and using that understanding to create mid to high fidelity mockups of a proposed solution.

We needed a way to understand a larger, general user group before we could start narrowing down, so we started by sending off a survey to a variety of gaming communities. The data that we got from this survey served as the basis of our user group and problem statement, as well as heavily influencing our designs.

I was in charge of analyzing and synthesizing all of the data we collected. I devised a hypothesis method that would help make sense of the data. I would pose questions relevant to our criteria, and would then confirm or deny the answer to this question using the data.

Based on our data, I found a number of things.

Our users seemed to be out of touch with their headset sounds, and were often annoyed by how long it took to manually configure their sounds for each game across different platforms. I also identified that many gamers prefer to play with friends over discord, showing the most enjoyment when that criteria is met.

We found a fairly coherent user group, but the term "gamer" is so broad that we needed to split it up in two: serious and social. This helped us keep track of the essential attributes we found, while also acknowledging the vast range of gamer types.

With our personas and understanding of our user's needs, we were able to create a problem statement in which we were able to synthesize their needs into one sentence.

We used this statement to guide our designs moving forward. This made sure everyone on the team had the same focus when coming up with new ideas.

Moving forward with our designs, we wanted to emphasize community over anything else because that was the common ground that bridged our two user groups. With that in mind, we created a platform that would allow gamers to share custom sound settings with their friends and all dolby users on the platform.

I wanted users to feel a sense of connectedness through a medium in which they didn't normally share. Swapping, comparing, and learning about others' sound settings gave users the ability experience the games they play through someone else's ears.

In order to share their sound experience, they also needed to be able to create one.

Overall this project was a success in my book. We by no means had the perfect solution, but the overall process we used to get to the final solution was backed-up and informed with our research. Each part of the project felt like it was useful in someway and each section always felt natural. This project also has taught me how to navigate a research-heavy project. We had complete creative freedom, which can be both a blessing and a curse. The possibilities were endless, but picking a half-decent idea out of this pool of infinite possibilities is a difficult task in of itself. Identifying when it was time to shift from research was probably the hardest part of this whole thing, as we could have spent years researching one aspect of this complicated problem space that is gaming. I learned how to transition from one stage to the next and how to inform each decision I made with previous or immediate research I had conducted.