Role:

Creative Director
Art Director
Product Designer
Product Manager
Retail Designer

Problem: The path to hearing aids is perilous (drama) for individuals 65+, there are too many steps and the lead time to clear hearing is at minimum a month long.

I'm spearheading Audicus' efforts to enhance accessibility and affordability of hearing aids. My role involves revamping the hearing test, developing a hearing aid simulator, ensuring brand cohesion, retail expansion and establishing design consistency across all platforms and mediums.

Color Palette

I chose a more mature palette during my brand overhaul because from user research we learned that people were confused by our brand due to the bright colors and elementary font choices, it didn’t feel professional or medical.

Typography

The old website used a “bubbly” serif as their primary font which didn't read very tech-y or medical so I switched it over to a sans serif that is highly legible and more on brand with our company. It is important to note that this demographic not only has hearing impairments but visual impairments as well.

Environmental Photography

I was fortunate enough to get to creative direct a shoot to switch over our environmental shots. I have learned from working at Audicus that customers want to see how subtle the hearing aids look and where they can go with them. This is a big departure from our old creative direction which was trying to show that hearing aids can still be “sexy”.

Hearing loss is an emotional loss. It affects every part of your life and reduces the joy that you once found in the little moments.

Product Photography

I work with an external agency to shoot all of products, flat lays and occasionally in hand photos. My goal for these product shots were to show how sleek this product is and the scale.

Our customer’s top concern is the size of our product so I try to show the size in relation to scale often and I try to show them in the environments that you might put them down at the end of the day.

I also run our creative shoots for the holidays, the one with the little figurines absolutely cracks me up but, sadly, it doesn't test well with our users.

P.S. I recognize that baby blue isn’t fully ideal for product shots but the background options that this agency has… are not my favorite so the light blue is the best choice

Designer
Concept

Audicus found out that they were expanding into retail and decided they needed to update their current logo and icon to improve brand recognition both in-store and online.

I was tasked with this redesign but maintaining our logo recognition enough to keep the trust of our current customers.

Objective: Increase brand recognition with both the logo and icon
Problem: People think we are a “scam” company so switching up our logo too drastically could negatively impact the goodwill we have built with our consumers
Solution: Alter current logo enough that the icon can sit within but also stand alone

Product Designer
User Researcher

Our hearing aid simulator was created in order to show people the type of hearing enhancement they could expect from hearing aids without having to purchase. We chose to work with an external recording studio who could effectively record the sound through a hearing aid opposed to doctoring the audio ourselves.

Objective: Create an captivating lead capture tool while selling individuals on the product
Problem: Our audio wasn’t very captivating and the script was lacking.
Solution: Design an immersive experience that both stimulates the visual and audio experience.

Product Designer
User Flows
Prototyping

When I started at Audicus, they had a pre-existing hearing test but its branding was all over the place and the user experience wasn’t very thoughtful. Users struggled to get through the exam, it was too long and it lacked any proper checks for anomalies/user error.

Objective: Allow those who don’t live close to audiologist take a reliable hearing test from the comfort of their home
Problem: People often times don’t trust online exams but also environmental factors can contribute to poor test results
Solution: Create an exam that has clear instructions on how to take a successful exam while leading them through a seamless test experience.

Print Design
Kiosk Wrap Design
Digital Marketing Design

Audicus partnered up with Sam’s Club to embark on our retail journey. There was a preexisting hearing center in Sam’s Club that we had to “take over”. Getting visuals approved by a company as big of Sam’s Club was a long and arduous experience. We ultimately were no longer Audicus in Sam’s Club but Sam’s Club Hearing powered by Audicus. We had to fully strip away our identity and operate fully within the Sam’s Club design system.

Objective: Catch shoppers eye and intrigue while they are shopping in Sam’s Club and encourage them to test their hearing or interact with our simulator kiosk.
Problem: There was another hearing aid company there before us who never staffed their cubicle and were very unreliable.
Solution: Create an eye catching display that allows user to interact without fulfilling committing to the hearing aid experience. Create avenues that allows the user to test at home or in store while offering our exclusive Sam’s Club pricing.

Product Designer
User Flows
Asset Creator
Art Director
QA

This was a big project that I had to fight to get started. Audicus when I arrived, hosted their e-commerce site on a free version of Wordpress with nearly 100 plugins. We were unable to fix the smallest of things due to lack of dev resources and a disastrous code base. I realized the need for a complete recode when I was trying to implement my brand overhaul. Adjusting the font styling across the site required our “devs” (this isn’t shade, we just never had a real developer until a few months ago) to go page by page, section by section because there was no formalized style sheet.