Next Gen Station Pitch

At Starry, the core business was to create a modern internet experience for customers to have low rates and high quality service. The company had built a touch screen router that allowed you to see all your devices online, and perform simple tasks like speed tests and see your wifi password.

Goal

The goal of this project was to understand the smart device market and pitch concepts to leadership on what the next generation of Station router could become. What can we bundle into our router to provide value for the high end tier? Should station become voice enabled/capable? Should it have a camera? Far field mic? What quality speaker?

As the industrial design team began to understand the internal components station could have, the small product design team of 3 led the research to understand how that would affect the user, and the current screen UI.

Research

Each team member was tasked with different components of research to understand the current market.

Market research: What is on the market and how much does it cost?
User research: how are people using current voice capable devices?
Component research: what do each of the devices on the market look like? What are the internal specs?
Provision research: how for they turn on and connect to your account?
Experience research: how for they function? What are the best practices to create the voice enabled device?

What we learned

Market: we are still in the early 1st era of voice assistances.
User research: Smart Speakers are quite prevalent; 40% of our respondents have at least one. People love smart speakers, and their engagement and enjoyment grow over time. Privacy is the top reason for 17.4% of non-users who don’t want a smart speaker.
Components: There is a cost to adding new parts into our boards. Along with our wifi board, we would need to add multiple pics, a speaker with a minimum speaker quality. And a 7in screen to compete with these are devices.
Provisioning: Devices are challenged with on boarding a user because it has difficulty finding wifi without a screen. Its even more difficult to pair an IoT device to your voice assistant because it needs you to download an app to connect. Being the wifi, could we make this simpler?
Experience: When speaking to a voice assistant, conversational / improvisational voice interactions work best. There are a lot of language nuances to consider like slang, culture and implied responses. Once a user has spoken to the device, getting the audio feedback right is hard which is why Smart Screens are becoming a thing.

What we pitched

We created multiple concepts that enabled different view points and level of integrations starting with just enabling an app skill on a 3rd party device, creating a voice only device, or creating a smart device. Here are a few examples of devices we pitched.