Cisco 730 Headset
Designed for work, life, and the journey in between.
The Cisco Headset 730 is a premium Bluetooth headset for work and personal contexts. Developed for use in the office or while travelling, the unit features adaptive noise cancellation, business security features and an integrated microphone for full call control.
Supporting Designer to Naoki Shimada, Lead.
Responsibilities include: Initial headset Ideation, CMF, Charging Dock, Human Factors Research and Testing.
US Patent D920955
Red Dot 2020 winner
Launched 2019 | Product Page
1 million unit+ portfolio
Leadership Otto Williams
Work, Home and
In-between
From the hustle of open plan work environments to the transitory journey home, the goal is to provide the best isolation for maximum self reflection and focus, while providing the best avenue for communicating to everyone on the journey in a day.
Boomless
A traditional Boom will provide the best speech capture, but is not practical for life outside the office and is an antiquated form factor. We sought to deliver boom performance in a stylish, compact boomless form factor.
Create a mixed use headset that can be used for work and leisure.
Maintain compact sizing for ease of portability
Deliver best in class comfort for extended use times
Accessories that showcase the identity of the headset
Problem
A gap in the enterprise headset market was noticed, where users have separate devices for home and work. We sought to bridge the gap.
Task
Beyond initial ideation, I was responsible for developing a test methodology and testing all rounds of protypes to reach a favorable usability baseline. In addition, I was responsible fort the charging dock and the packaging loadout.
Action
I started by breaking down key aspects of headset mechanics and conducting usability tests to identify which of these aspects help drive better comfort, from early prints to hard tooled validation builds. In addition the work on the Charging dock design was driven heavily by the most efficient manner of packaging and reducing waste.
Result
This headset family was well received, with a Red Dot Award and contributing to a portfolio of a million units, while helping expand the visibility of a growing headset lineup.
Design Objective
Best
of the Best
40mm drivers
20 hours of talk time
Multi mode Active Noise Cancelling
Selectable ambient mode
Patented pass through mic horns for speech pickup
On board DAC
Bluetooth and 3.5mm inputs
Multi device pairing
Do not Disturb/ Busy Indicator
AI voice activated mics
Head First
This being our first ground up headset, meant that I had to learn on the fly, from scientific manuals through a hands on approach to understand best comfort, the parameters that determine it and create an objective evaluation and test procedure to ensure the best in class on ear headset.
Trust the Numbers
This dataset from the final PVT units highlights the process’ success with a balanced headset that is stable, yet comfortable for a work day, without major fatigue. Several rounds of test were carried out at each prototype stage with feedback informing the next. Competitive benchmarking was also carried out to gauge performance validity.
5 Pillars of Comfort
These 5 interconnected attributes helped ground the testing into quantifiable, objectively measurable data that could be correlated to user’s subjective ratings.
An Example:
With a 0.8mm thick headband we noticed complaints of tightness, going down to 0.7mm alleviated that issue, but reduced stability. Slight revisions to the foam then addressed the stability issue.
Head Related Transfer Function and Virtual Auditory Display- Bosun Xie
Monument
to Silence
Counterweight is exposed where
Function is the form
The goal for the Dock design is to create a pedestal that highlights the Headset. All sides are zero draft to create a pure form that creates a sense of solidity and purpose. This from also allows the docks and it’s stand to collapse and ship in a flat-pack to keep packaging size in check.
Stand ships flat packed to minimize package size, for
Efficiency
Two Color ways were planned out and I looked at where the user would work from, artifacts they may encounter and use and of course, how the color palate would extenuate the surfaces of the headset.
The dock’s primary aim was to be as minimal as possible, to that we developed a zero draft process to have perfect symmetry and alignment between the base, stand and the headset.
Head Games
My contributions on the ideation side came early on to provide ideas to the team and then focus on the charging dock development, end to end.
Broadcast
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