OPIM 415 Anchor Feedback Tests

Product: The Anchor (Earbud clip attachments)

Team: Kevin Kim, Tarik Bellamine, Jonathan Bryan

Test #1: Elbow mechanism

Focus of Test
The focus of this first test will be to measure and evaluate user feedback on the elbow
mechanism of the Anchor. The elbow mechanism is designed as a joint to allow right-to-left
movement of the ear arm of the Anchor along a straight-line plane. This elbow allows users to
adjust the fit of the Anchor around their ear based on their own physical and personal
preferences. Since all people have differently shaped heads and ears, we wanted to provide an
additional method of customization that could suit everyones needs.
Methodology
We assembled an audience that was willing to undergo a two-phase testing process for the elbow
mechanism. The first phase was to allow each user five minutes alone to test the product
themselves with the newest edition of Apple earbud headphones, and then ask each user to write
a half page to a page single-spaced on their experiences with the Anchor given a set of basic
guided questions. The second phase was to assemble all users together for a twenty-minute
focus group with two members of the team. This is necessary to elicit individual user opinions, as
well as develop a more comprehensive understanding of key user pain points, needs and
suggestions for changes.
Audience
The audience was a group of 7 Penn students, ranging from freshmen to a graduate research
student. The group was made up of 4 females and 3 males, all moderate to frequent gym-goers.
We found these students through asking our respective friends for people who would be willing to
give up a bit of their time to help with some research about their gym habits. Essentially, this
represents our target market - college students who go to the gym, so this is a particularly
representative sample.
Metrics
We consolidated the users written individual feedback reports from their five-minute testing
periods with their oral feedback from the focus group into a few key takeaways. This particular
test was more qualitative than quantitative, as the second test deals more with quantitative
metrics. It is crucial to understand that qualitative data in product testing is equally important as
quantitative data to extract insights about the user and how they interact with the product.
Results
Takeaway 1: The aesthetic appeal of the design could use some improvement
Individual user reports discussed the slightly strange and large shape of the ear clip as
not being particularly aesthetically appealing in contrast to the smooth and sleek design
of Apple earbuds.
Focus group reports emphasized this as an important concern to a style-conscious body
of university-age students.
Takeaway 2: The elbow mechanism fulfills the basic user need of customization by ear shape
Both the individual user reports and the focus group session data supported the basic
effectiveness of the elbow mechanism in allowing a user to adjust for their particular ear
shape and size using the elbow mechanism.
However, a popular suggestion from both qualitative data sets was to try adjusting the
location of the elbow to provide for even more flexibility. One user noted that he believed
the Anchor could be more stable if the joint was at a halfway point in the hook, to allow
the hook to snap onto the ear and hold it steady.
Takeaway 3: The elbow mechanism feedback differs along gender lines

The focus group in particular discussed how a few users were concerned that the
material and design of the joint could make it victim to an accidental break with heavy
usage.
The individual reports were mixed - of the four users that discussed the stability of the
make of the joint, the two female users thought that the joint was made out of a flexible
enough material that breaking would be unlikely, while the two male users believed that a
more stable elbow design was needed, asserting that the back-and-forth elbow motion
felt a little awkward.
An initial hypothesis of this qualitative data is that generally, female users would use the
Anchor for a more limited range of activities at the gym (perhaps the elliptical, treadmill,
stretching) vis-a-vis male users (all of the previously stated activities plus dynamic
weightlifting, sports, etc.) and that males perhaps desire more stability. It is apparent that
further testing of this hypothesis is necessary.

Test #2: Overall stability and effectiveness

Focus of Test
The focus of this second test is to test how effective the Anchor is at fulfilling its core design
imperative: to allow a pair of headphones to stay on a users ears as they exercise at the gym.
This is what the Anchor was designed to do, and we ran three rounds of live testing at our local
Penn gym to evaluate its level of stability.
Methodology
Since our team has three members who all are moderate gym users, we made ourselves the test
subjects in this instance. We first performed a control round to act as a baseline - each of us put
on a set of current iPhone 5-generation Apple earbuds and ran for a single five-minute period on
a treadmill at Pottruck Gym with treadmill speed and incline settings of our personal choosing.
We then repeated this task with the Anchor attached to our earbud headphones. After this, we
rated our experience for both the control round and the experimental round on a numerical scale
along four primary metrics, to collect quantitative data on the effectiveness of our product.
Audience
Our team used our own three members as our audience. Given that we had already conducted a
fairly extensive qualitative study with members outside of our team, we felt that we had gleaned a
good deal of user insight on our product, and that evaluating the pure effectiveness of our product
at this current early stage was something that could be handled internally. Since many technology
company employees demo or dogfood beta versions of their products themselves in their daily
lives, we decided to incorporate this standard as well.
Metrics
We rated our experience both with regular headphones and with the Anchor on a Likert scale of
integers 1 (least effective) to 5 (most effective) along a set of the following four metrics: stability
on ear, quality of sound, comfort, ease of use, and then averaged the data by metric. The most
useful analyses of these tests will be comparing the control round scores, both by person and on
average, to the experimental round scores. If we had more time or more users, we would
implement an additional conjoint analysis to weigh the four categories by how important we
consider them to be.
Results
Average Control Round Scores (rounded to two significant figures):
1.7 - Stability on ear
2.0 - Quality of sound
1.9 - Comfort

3.4 - Ease of use

Average Experimental Round Scores (rounded to two significant figures):

3.4 - Stability on ear
3.2 - Quality of sound
2.8 - Comfort
3.7 - Ease of use
Takeaway 1: The Anchor outperforms the control on all four categories, providing a better gym
experience vis-a-vis regular Apple headphones
Across the board, the average experimental scores beat the average control scores in
every category. While this is certainly a small and perhaps biased sample size, this is
good news.
The lowest margin of victory was in the Ease of use category - certainly, people have
been using regular earbud headphones for most of their lives, and a new addition that
clips onto a regular pair of headphones will have a slight learning curve.
Takeaway 2: Absolute scores of the Anchor along the four metrics are not particularly high,
signaling the potential for improvement in these categories
The absolute average numbers for the experimental round are lower than we expected,
particularly in the Stability on ear and Quality of sound categories.
We noted that the design of the Anchor was perhaps suited towards a bigger-thanaverage ear and thus might not be suited towards an average college student - we will
test different curve sizes to improve on this point.

We think that the low overall Comfort scores might be attributed to familiarity, but we
intend on running larger-scale studies on Comfort to validate this hypothesis.