Clarifying questions:

When we say fire alarm for deaf does it mean the users need to be alerted in case of fire/smoke?

Answer: Yes The user needs to be alerted in case of fire/smoke.

When we say deaf: A deaf person has little to no hearing. They often use sign language for communication. they cannot use devices to aid their hearing loss.

This product are we looking to design for the alarm to be used in the home or office/shopping malls etc.

For smaller homes, having smoke detectors can be sufficient. However, in larger homes, estates, or buildings, having a fire alarm is necessary to alert everyone to a potential fire.

Answer for the purpose of this exercise I would be choosing a product to be used in the house.

Here is the structure I would like to address User groups –> Needs –> Solutions–> Priortization.

Our customers might be following.

• Primary users are Deaf people
• Secondary users would be Parents/caretakers/health care providers.
• Apartment owners who rent to home to the deaf persons.

Based on our earlier assumption for deafness is they would not be using a hearing aid to their deafness as they have little or no hearing.

For this exercise, I would like to address the primary users.

Common user needs and challenges.

1. they need to be alarmed when they are awake.
2. They need to be alarmed for a fire due to natural causes (Bush Fires, Forest fires)

Challenges: The warning system used in most areas around the world is based on sound. Therefore, Deaf and hard of hearing citizens need a specialized system of communication in order to respond to an emergency.

3. They need to be notified when they are not awake.

Challenges: Here they cannot see visual alarms nor they can be woken up with sound alarms until and unless they are with a secondary user who could hear.

To address the primary needs of the deaf users Here are the solutions.

• A stand-alone device that is compatible with existing smoke detectors to emit colored/flavored smoke

Analysis and challenges: Users might be concerned about stains from colored or flavored smoke. One other concern is the smoke from this device should not be strong enough to trigger a smoke alarm.

• A stand-alone device is compatible with existing smoke detectors with strobe lights and Vibration notification devices, such as pillow or bed shakers.

Analysis There already a lot of hardware products in the market for the same. These need to be connected/plugged in and the bed shakers, if not placed under the bed, would be ineffective in alarming a person.

• A stand-alone device smart smoke detector and mobile app which can be communicated to existing smart home lights to wake up the person and notify about the alarm.

existing smart home smoke detectors like the nest is the connectivity to connected lights wad disabled during migration to google account and the alarm notifications are primarily targeted for the secondary users

I would recommend a smart home smoke detector based on customer impact, ease of implementation, Cost to build. with the following features in the app.

1. notify all the family members of the alarm.
2. the display sign language of fire in the notification.
3. An alarm can be the app should emit colored flashing lights to alert the users and a vibrating alarm
4. Request to engage in a video call. A video call can help those who are lip readers.
5. For any amber alerts translate to sign language.
6. Add-on bed shaker to aid in case of an alarm.

Out of all the features listed, I would like to prioritize #3,#4#2#1 as the MVP as these would target alerting the deaf users in case of fire.

Clarification Questions

• What’s defined as deaf, are they completely deaf, partially, users that wear a hearing aid? < Let’s assume all spectrums >
• Where is the fire alarm situated? Is it inside a residential apartment, school, house, office building? It can have an impact on the pain points/solutions I propose. < Let’s assume that it is in a residential apartment >
• About our company, are we a business that makes fire alarms already and want to transition into this market? Have we seen that deaf people have had troubles navigating during fire alarms? < We’ve noticed that some deaf individuals obviously have trouble noticing fire alarms and want to fix that. We are new to this industry. >
• Follow up to the last question, since we are new. Are we constrained by any time or resources? <Nope but obviously we want to have a quick go-to-market product >

Business Objective & Goals

• I think this is amazing that we are a company going for this, obviously safety of every individual is really important and in life/death situations, if safety precautions are not accounting for a certain individual that’s really dangerous.
• For this interview, let’s consider the standard fire alarm to be the ones that play a loud ringing noise and occasionally have a small red beeping red light. Each apartment unit has a fire alarm in their apartment, but it’s usually in the hallway, kitchen etc. I know it varies in apartment buildings so it’s important to have a standard definition moving forward on how we can improve on it.
• I think our goal is to get people out of their homes safely, and a metric that we can track to ensure that is happening is adoption by apartment buildings. The more buildings that have our fire alarm, the safer it is for everyone.

We’ve already defined a customer segment, so I’m going to discuss some pain points / motivations for deaf people interacting with fire alarms. It should be noted that there is a secondary customer segment. The deaf individual could be living with others so we want to ensure that all parties relying on the fire alarm are able to use and maintain it.

Pain Points

• Attention ? If they are not in the vicinity of the fire alarm it becomes difficult to notice / hear it. They could be distracted on their phone, cooking etc and would not be able to notice it.
• Maintenance ? Is it out of batteries? Is it on? This could be something that’s also particularly painful for the user.
• Calling for help ? When the user is aware of the fire, how do they call for help? Some individuals may be deaf since they were born and may not be able to talk as well.

I’d want to prioritize these based on how prominent the pain point is and the frequency it happens at. Since we are in residential apartments, I don’t think that calling for help is too frequent of a problem. My apartment used to have a thing that if a fire alarm isn’t turned off within 30s – 1 min, it would trigger an evacuation for the entire building. Though some apartments may not have that feature, making it a prominent problem. I think maintenance is a low impact / low frequency problem. It’s not something that’s done often and is usually checked when they individual is moving in. Or the landlord could be doing routine checks if they know the individual is deaf. I think attention is the root problem making it the most prominent. If they can’t see the fire alarm going off, they can contact or help. Many times the user could be distracted and be too late to put out the fire or evacuate. So with that, I’d like to focus on the attention pain point given its impact and frequency.

Solutions

• Vibrations ? The room is equipped with devices that are linked to the fire alarm. It gives a slight buzz to the floor to notify the individual that it is on. There could be some problems with this, for example, the effects on the structural integrity of the building when the room shakes. Will it bother others living in the apartment or other rooms above or below.
• Lights in Every Room ? Every room turns red when the fire alarm is triggered. Kinda dramatic but it’s hard to miss that unless they are sleeping. Helps target another one of their senses to make up for the lack of hearing.
• Connectivity to Phone ? Each fire alarm adds a chip that can be connected to the users phone. When the fire alarm goes off, the app sends an emergency signal to the users phone either in the form of a notification, text message, vibrations, call to alert them that there is a fire.

To prioritize these solutions, I’d like to base it on three factors:

• Effort required to create the solution
• Impact the solution has on the pain point
• Reality Check ? Is this feasible and could see both apartment owners adopting this and this benefitting deaf individuals

I think the first solution of vibrations requires a lot of effort from the apartment buildings for settingup and the cost to benefit may not be high despite it helping deaf individuals. The impact is high considering it works but with a lot of associated risks within the reality check component. It could ruin furniture, disturb neighbors, impact structural integrity of the building.

The second solution again could require a lot of effort from the apartment building owners. I think it has a medium impact since there are still some scenarios (sleeping) where it would not work for the deaf individual unless they were with others. It’s not completely unrealistic, I’m sure there are smart lightbulbs that could be incorporated, but I just don’t see it working at this time.

I think the phone connectivity is a smart solution with minimal effort for the apartment owner and for us to build it. It could send the signal via wifi which has another benefit for secondary customers. Say ou’re not deaf and are out; the phone could notify you that your fire alarm is going off rather than you coming home and realizing it too late. I think it’s more realistic given the fact that a lot of people have phones that they keep close to them and the buzzing and lighting solutions previously mentioned, could be incorporated at a smaller scale into this solution. Next I’d like to talk about how we could measure success for this product.

Success Metrics

• North Star ? Mentioned previously is the number of apartment buildings incorporating it which is a good acquisition metric
• # of fires attended to ? After each alert, we could have a quick survey of two questions that asks:
  • Were you aware of the incident due to the app
  • How did you respond? (Could be a drop down of, evacuation, called help etc)
  • This could give insight on potential improvements and of the people that were made aware, they were able to successfully respond to it.
• Customer Satisfaction ? Running a sentiment analysis on reviews or just ratings to see whether users are liking this app.

Clarifying Question – Fire Alarm System Functioning:

1. Flashes and beeps loudly when it detects smoke above a certain threshold
2. Can be turned off by fire brigade for office buildings or by individuals in a house
3. Is often connected to the fire department

Clarifying questions and assumptions:

4. Fire alarm – Alerts the room occupants about a potential fire hazard and asks them to evacuate the place.
5. Deaf – can see things (yes), can not hear things at all. They don’t have any other major physical constraints in terms of walking etc.
6. Is this for a residential or professional setting – Residential

Goal: To have an alarm system that can be easily discovered by deaf people and allows them (along with non deaf users) to discover fire hazard and vacate a place.

Primary Users:

7. Deaf users – These may be fully or partially deaf users, who can’t really hear things.

Secondary Users:

8. Secondary users: These users not physically challenged in any way and may be living or working with deaf users.

Problems faced by deaf users:

9. Can’t be alerted via sound since they can’t hear it
10. Don’t know if the alarm is turned off if they press a button the fire alarm system.
11. They often can’t speak properly due to their inability to hear and learn how to speak. So it may be hard for them to inform their friends or families in the same house about a fire. Also hard for them to call 911 and inform that there is a fire.

In terms of the above problems, I want to focus on #1 and #2 since they are usually the biggest problems in the usual day to day scenarios. For #3 a well informed deaf person would know about tone-deaf options for deaf and mute users.

Below are some solutions to this problem:

12. Smart Fire Alarm –
    1. Safety app that sends emails, push, SMS, and calls informing the user and relevant parties that there is fire and which fire sensor in the house detected it. Ability to deactivate alarms from mobile phone app.
    2. Sound, light, and hazard vibrators – Home fire alarm that beep loudly and also project bright light signs that inform the deaf person that there is an alarm. There will also be strong vibration integrated in these room alarms that will not just beep, project light, but also vibrate strongly to get attention.
    3. Simple instructions on the alarm devices to deactivate a false alarm.
13. Fire Roomba – Small robot that can move in the house like a Roomba with bright lights flashing and indicating that a potential fire has been detected and where it is.

I will prioritize between these two ideas based on the following dimensions:

14. Impact on user experience (safety, being able to alert quickly, and ease of canceling false alarms) and engineering cost

Based on these #1 – smart fire alarm seems easier to implement in terms of engineering effort. It will also have a bigger impact on users since they can be alerted about fire hazards even when they are remote.

Success Metrics:

15. Purchase volume
16. Customer satisfaction rating (NPS, referrals)
17. App usage – MAU for users of fire alarm

Approach

1. Clarify the question
   1. Define deaf –> unable to hear, but can communicate via sign language, lip read and use all other senses
   2. Define fire alarm –> for residential use, it notifies occupants of smoke and potential fires and alerts fire department to check in and/or come over
   3. Define constraints –> budgetary constraint, design should be user-friendly and convenient
   4. Define goals –> get folks out of harm’s way quickly and notify fire department to check in or come over
2. Identify users
   1. Deaf people who live in a home by themselves
   2. Deaf people who are home alone, because other household members are away for an extended period of time
3. Identify pain points
   1. Need to be able to shut it off, especially if it is a false alarm
   2. Need to be made aware of alarm if they are sleeping
   3. Needs to reach all rooms/corners of the house
   4. Needs to be blatant enough to get their attention if they are distracted (on the phone or making dinner)
4. Brainstorm solutions
   1. Wearable that vibrates when smoke or fire is detected. It is connected to smoke detectors placed all over the house. It can be shut off with a button. Another button can contact local fire department via video technology or text
   2. Home smoke detectors are connected to an app on user’s phone. When smoke is detected, the phone vibrates, sends user push notifications and reaches out to the user’s emergency contact and local fire department to check in via text or video communication software(for sign-language communication)
   3. A special paint on the walls of the house that has a chemical that senses smoke/fire and turns the walls red/or noticeable contrasting color to notify the user. User can then contact fire department, or open windows to air out the house if it is a false alarm. When smoke dissipates, the chemical in the paint returns to normal.
5. Evaluate and prioritize solutions
   1. Wearables can be annoying to wear 24/7 and the vibration might to rouse a sleeping user (2)
   2. Seems like a viable option to have the sensors connected to an app which reaches out to an emergency contact and the fire department, but the user still needs to know to get out of the house. Perhaps the sensors around the house can emit a bright white light that will pierce through a user’s sleep and light up the whole house like it is daytime. However, if the user is in the shower, the light might not reach that room. (1)
   3. Won’t help if user is sleeping, distracted, not home or at night when everything is dark. (3)
6. Recommend solution and conclude
   1. I recommend option B. The app can be free or a low price to fit with the budgetary constraint. A mobile app is user-friendly and convenient, because users often have their phones nearby. It reaches out to an emergency contact and the fire department via an automated text message so they can spread awareness, get help and communicate. Even if the user is not home, the app is still connected to the home’s smoke detectors and notifies appropriate parties. In addition, other household members or even neighbors can be connected and look out for each other by communicating via the app on a messaging forum to investigate, post pictures and rate the strength of the smoke/fire. This is a good backup, because even if one person’s phone is dead or the deaf user is left unaware, others are included in the communication channel. However, if technology has a glitch or is faulty, a backup would be crucial. In this case, an alternate technology, like a wearable can be used as an extra safety precaution.