This week on the Future Ear Radio podcast, I’m joined by product designer, Nick Morgan-Jones. At age ten, Nick was diagnosed with high-frequency hearing loss and was prescribed hearing aids. Nick quickly decided that he’d rather live with his hearing loss, than be stigmatized and bullied, and it wasn’t until he was 19 years-old when he ultimately decided to start wearing hearing aids.
Now, at 28, Nick’s pursuing to reimagine and redesign the whole premise of how we design, market and communicate hearing loss solutions with Butterfly Audio. If we’re serious about increasing the adoption of people treating their hearing losses, then I think it’s worth including some entirely new perspectives’ into the discussion, such as Nick’s.
As we discuss throughout the conversation, there are a myriad of issues with the status quo with treating hearing loss. For starters, it’s almost entirely a one-size-fits-all approach. The devices marketed at seniors are the exact same as the ones marketed toward young people.
It’s understandable why the vast majority of the marketing and product design decisions cater to older adults, as age-related hearing losses comprise the bulk of the overall patient demographic. However, is there not an opportunity for at least one brand or product line to deviate from the uniformity of the increasingly-small receiver-in-the-canal design? Even if teens and young adults comprise a small portion of the patient demographic, we’re still talking about millions of people.
There are a lot of advantages to making a such a device completely visible. For one, if you’re not attempting to make the device as small as possible, you open up a lot more real estate that can serve as a home to more components which enable greater levels of functionality. Second, as Nick mentions, the trend toward invisibility might further reinforce a sense of shame, implying that no one should know you’re wearing an amplification device.
It’s encouraging that we’re seeing more device types enter into the fold, such as earbuds that function like hearing aids. In Nick’s opinion though, there’s lot of room for entirely new form factors (such as Butterfly Audio’s design).
The way in which we speak about the devices is important too. We reference Nick’s video below during our conversation about the subtly of language decisions.
The language we use to describe products completely dictates how we feel about them.
— How to Not Build Hearing Aids (@ButterflyAudio_) August 23, 2021
Taking apart hearing aids and earbuds has got me thinking.
We all have preconceived views with certain terms like #hearingaids that blind us from the benefits of these products. pic.twitter.com/Kqh3pNzf8I
Ultimately, Nick is designing and building a prototype that he personally would want to wear. He’s going to need help, so if Nick’s message resonates with you, know that his door is open and he’d love to connect (Twitter and LinkedIn).
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp:
Hi, I’m your host, Dave Kemp. And this is future ear radio. Each episode, we’re breaking down one new thing, one cool new finding that’s happening in the world of hearables, the world of voice technology. How are these worlds starting to intersect? How are these worlds starting to collide? What cool things are going to come from this intersection of technology? Without further ado, let’s get on with the show.
Dave Kemp:
All right, so we are joined here today by Nick Morgan Jones. Nick, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Hey. My name’s Nick, I am based in Berlin, and I’m working on a project called Butterfly Audio. In a nutshell, I’m trying to build hearing enhancing wearables for people who don’t want to wear hearing aids. And this is the personal project which has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, really. I first found out when I was 10 years old that I needed hearing aids, because I was sitting in class at school and I think the teacher was getting annoyed because someone’s alarm was going off on their watch and they didn’t turn it off. And I was looking around angrily, and who’s got their alarm on? Because I had no idea that it was my watch and I couldn’t hear the high pitched tone. And then my mom said, “Maybe you should go get your ears checked.” And turns out I had high frequency hearing loss.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And so age 10, I’m still in primary school, it is elementary school in the US, and I get hearing aids. And I had this interesting feeling right at the beginning, because the idea of getting hearing aids back then for me was, “Wow, I’m going to have superhuman hearing. I’m going to be able to hear through walls and stuff and be some crazy spy gadgets,” something like that.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And then, age 10 to 11 is when you go to secondary school, so this is beginning of middle school/high school combined. And I think I got three days in of wearing these, and I was like, “Nope, I actually want to have some friends.” So I took these off and I went the next I think nine years from that point completely avoiding wearing hearing aids. Because I want to be seen wearing them. I hated the idea of having these chunks of plastic, which were a bit of, I don’t know, a label that said, “Oh, you’re disabled in some way.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And it’s a weird trade off, looking at it in hindsight, because I didn’t want to wear hearing aids because I didn’t want to be seen wearing them, but the amount of embarrassing situations I found myself in because I wasn’t wearing them, the amount of things that I missed when people were saying, it really wasn’t great. It really made me realize just how important your hearing is for your sense of self in any social environment.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
It wasn’t until I was 19 when I went to university, and I got some hearing aids then. I figured, probably about time I [inaudible 00:03:13], paying far too much money for this university education, I should probably make most of it.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I was studying product design engineering, so it’s like industrial design. And as part of my dissertation thesis project at the end of my third year, I had the opportunity to design a medical product. And instantly, this was, “Okay, I’m redesigning hearing aids. This is super important to me, so I’m going to do this.” And the project went quite well, but it was very much in an educational format. It wasn’t really real world in any sense, but it definitely explored a lot of different angles of how I saw hearing tech, what my vision was for how hearing tech should really be seen in the world.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
After that finished, I realized that probably a little bit more money in digital design than hardware design. And I’m super fascinated with psychology, and how people make decisions just in general. And UX design is a great combination of psychology and design that brings these things together. And so for the next seven years, I’ve actually been working as a UX designer, user experience designer, designing digital products for startups, agencies, whatnot.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And eventually I just got to a point where I just really wanted to go back and work on my own projects. And so I started at the beginning of this year really focusing on what I now call Butterfly Audio, which is this project where I want to redesign, reposition, completely rethink how we use hearing technology.
Dave Kemp:
I love it. What a cool background there. Thank you for sharing that.
Dave Kemp:
So, I met you on Twitter. Again, I always sing the praises of Twitter as a unbelievable networking tool. Here you are in Berlin, I know you’re from the UK originally, but it’s just so cool that we’re able to connect, I can learn about you. And we’re very minded in many ways. And so I think that this is so fascinating that you had, all the way rooting back to when you were 10 years old, this experience where you wanted to fit in and so therefore, to your own detriment, you decided that the solution for the problem that you were diagnosed with, with high frequency hearing loss, you just decided was the social element outweighed the benefits of the device.
Dave Kemp:
And this is the quintessential problem I think with hearing aids in general, is that it’s so negatively connotated with old age and with disablement and geriatrics, whatever you want to call it. But I think that what’s fascinating is, when we’ve started to talk and I’ve understood more about what you’re attempting to do with Butterfly, and we’re going to get into that today, is I think it’s really interesting to hear somebody who’s young that’s presented with this, in a world where every single company that makes these devices is seemingly making them either in trying to make them invisible, which reinforces the stigma, and then they’re also marketing it in such a way where it feels it’s connotated to our older demographics.
Dave Kemp:
So as a young person with a hearing loss, where do you fit in? I just find that to be really interesting. And I want to give you a chance here to comment on that, which is it does seem one of the problems in today’s, call it the hearing aid environment, and the ways in which we address hearing loss, is it’s so pigeonholed into a very specific demographic, different user. And understandably, obviously, that demographic makes up the bulk of sales, so I do understand why. But I do also find it odd that very, very few, if any of the campaigns that I’ve ever seen seem to target young people, like a child that has hearing loss, and marketing a product and soliciting it toward and making it so that it’s appealing. It’s not something, again, going back to what you said at 10 years old, that seems to be something that is we really do need to unravel that in such a way, because it has a lot of really negative secondary implications, the way I see it.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Absolutely. Maybe for context, I’m 28 years old, and I can agree. I’ve never seen anything which is really speaking up to me or representing what I see as important in the hearing space. And exactly like you said, looking at the available markets for hearing technology, it’s almost an exponential line. The older you get, the more people have hearing loss, and therefore there’s realistically more business opportunity in that area. But there’s still millions and millions of people under the age of 35 or whatever, a lot of young people have hearing loss as well. And where are the products for those people?
Nick Morgan-Jones:
It seems a little bit counterintuitive to continuously focus on this older demographic as well. Like you said, this concept of aging is so closely tied to hearing. And the relationship that we have to these products is, “I don’t want to wear this because it looks I’m getting older,” and then it keeps being marketed towards older people, and then reinforcing that stigma that only old people need this product.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And so I’ve always thought, “Why aren’t these products even marketed or idolized around a younger population, to really try to remove that stigma and association with aging at every step?” I feel a little bit left out in this hearing world, to be honest.
Dave Kemp:
I think we’re both in agreement that there needs to be some kind of change. And if it’s not going to come from one of the big manufacturers, if their interests are all sort of geared around the older demographics, now Baby Boomers, where do people that are 40 years and younger fit into this whole thing?
Dave Kemp:
And I think that’s what’s so interesting. From where you are coming at this, it’s actually I think an extremely refreshing approach. Which is first of all, why does a hearing aid need to be invisible? Because that’s very limiting from a hardware standpoint. When we’re talking about out a device that is increasingly becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, it’s so limiting in terms of the features and the functionality and all that, because you just don’t have that much real estate to cram all the different components that you need. It also drives up the cost big time. So by reinforcing this idea that we should feel ashamed, that there is a disablement or something like that, and that these things should be as invisible as it comes, again, it seems really limiting.
Dave Kemp:
And so I want to give you a chance here. I think what might be best is let’s go back to your design background. So, start with what you were doing with digital design, how maybe some of that’s translated. I know that in our conversation we had before we started recording, you had said how brutal the world of designing hardware is in producing something. But I think that I’m curious to hear about how the software side has lended itself in all of your experience there into what you’re doing now. And then from there, I would love to start to open this up into what you’re learning so far as you, as you say in your Twitter bio, “I’m Nick. I’m designing and building my own pair of custom hearing enhancing wearables in my bedroom.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Yeah. Wow. Where do I start? The last six, seven years I’ve been designing digital products. And I think, conversely to hardware, the best thing or the biggest difference is just how quickly it moves. And iterations of designing and developing products, it’s just so much quicker. You can realistically build a product which satisfies most of the things that a user needs in a digital world in less than a week, a lot of the time. And that gives you a chance to make something, put it out and then learn about how people react to it, and then change it and adapt it and iterate and move forward. And you’re so much more engaged with the end user all the time, so much earlier on in the process, in order to push and accelerate development of any product you’re working on.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
I think now going into the hardware side, there’s definitely no less need to be involved with the user, but the iteration cycles are just so much longer. I’ve now been building what I’m working on now for a period of months, and it is only just taking shape. So it’s a lot harder to make that transition to the next stage, I think.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But I’ve definitely learned a lot from building digital products that can be brought into the hardware world, for sure.
Dave Kemp:
So, I’ve watched some of your videos, and it looks what you’re doing is first off, you’ve been deconstructing a lot of the devices that exist on the market, getting an idea of the guts of the device. And so as you’re assembling your own device, what’s going through your head right now of what you’re learning, what are things that you think maybe a reimagined hearing aid that’s geared more toward… And I don’t even want to limit it to just the younger population, because I think there’s probably a lot of older folks that would be open to this idea that it doesn’t need to be something that is made to be as discreet as possible. Some people might really want that, and that already exists. So I don’t think it’s as if we need to reimagine that, because that’s there.
Dave Kemp:
I think that we do need to reimagine something that people are actually proud of. Like you said, at 10 years old, I think there’s actually a lot of truth to that, that in a way, especially today’s modern hearing technology, it does offer a super power in the sense of you can do things that you can’t necessarily do on your own with your own God-given ears. So I’m curious. Let’s just start with the whole what you’re learning right now as you go, and the key insights that you’re having as you start on this process, even in your own bedroom as a hobbyist, basically, what you’re learning about things that maybe we can all be appreciative of about what this thing might look as a reimagined hearing device.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest element of reimagination here is the concept of visibility. I am really against this idea of hearing tech needs to be hidden. It’s just completely alien to me. Essentially, I feel the hearing aid manufacturers are designing things that should be hidden, and ultimately suggesting that I should be ashamed of wearing them, that I ought to be trying to hide them. And I don’t want these companies to be making that position for me. I will make that myself, thank you very much.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And growing up through school, I had friends wearing glasses, and I was always so jealous because if you have bad eyesight, you can choose from all these cool pairs of glasses, which you wear not only to improve your vision, but they become a part of your personality, and in a visual sense a decision to wear something that complements how you look. But hearing tech’s always just been hidden the whole time.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
So the first thing that I’ve done, working on trying to build my own pair of hearing-enhancing wearables in my bedroom, as I say [inaudible 00:16:15], is they have to be visible. There’s absolutely no attempt to hide them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They’re going to be purposely visible and unapologetically visible, not in any crazy over the top sense, but they’re going to be no more intrusive than wearing glasses frames.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And this means going to occupying space, not behind the ear or in your hair, or even in the ear canal, but outside of the ear, just in front of the ear where they’re clearly visible, as there are benefits for this I think technologically, in terms of microphone placement. Also, from a user experience perspective as well, a lot of hearing aid wearers that I speak to really agree with the idea of if your hearing aids are hidden and you need someone to see that maybe you can’t hear so well-
Dave Kemp:
It’s a great point.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
… It defeats the objective of having something hidden, as well. So I think that’s definitely the first step.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
I’m a designer by experience and trade. I’m not a technologist. So actually building something is incredibly new to me and incredibly challenging. But ultimately, what I’ve been doing is focusing on this new form factor: how can I get something that fits and looks great, and how can I find some electronics to put inside this thing so that it works? And I’m approaching it very hacking together whatever I can at the moment. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the tech.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Because I think that’s another important thing. There’s a lot of great hearing technology out there, but I think what is it, 80% of people who could benefit from hearing aids are not. So what I want to really try to do is stimulate that 80% of people who could really benefit from hearing technology and transform their lives in the same way that it has transformed mine, by creating a product that people actually want.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And that’s the difference between having a product that they ought to wear, but actually having a product that they want to wear.
Dave Kemp:
Love that.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
That’s really the direction I’m trying to take it.
Dave Kemp:
You said a couple things there that I thought were really interesting. First of all, I love this idea of a different form factor. And I had actually never thought about that, what you had said about when you make it more visible, it’s a signal that obviously, I’m hearing impaired. Or, people are curious as to what you’re wearing and therefore they might actually ask you, and then it gives you an opportunity to tell them. And I think that’s a very easy way to extinguish a lot of stigma, is people are like, “Oh, okay, that’s cool, those are cool looking things.”
Dave Kemp:
So I think that so much of this, it’s psychological. And it’s been so reinforced over the years. And it’s this self-fulfilling prophecy, where the consumer seems to indicate that they want it to be smaller and more discreet, and therefore the manufacturers follow suit. It’s like you’re following this idea that that’s what every single person wants, and it continues down this path without ever really stopping to realize that that might just be one portion of the patient demographic.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Absolutely.
Dave Kemp:
And to your point, with the whole 80%, this has been something that I’ve been talking about so often in so many different ways, which is it’s really obvious that what we’re doing today isn’t really working at scale. It is catering to the severe, that 20% of the pyramid, if you will, the top of the pyramid, the people with the most severe hearing loss, people with profound hearing loss. The people that really do need it are getting catered to; that’s great. But in doing so, I feel as if we’ve just completely neglected the people that are either on their way to that and they’re not ready for hearing aids for whatever reason, probably largely because of either the price or the negative connotation or with how difficult they are to access. It’s a combination of those three things.
Dave Kemp:
And so I just think this idea of, oh, just a completely redesigned form factor makes so much sense to me. Because again, it’s not like it’s removing functionality. It’s not removing what the product is designed to do. It’s just repositioning it in such a way that it just lends itself to a lot of different advantages, I would imagine.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Definitely. I think there’s a really interesting thing when you design products for users, and a lot of product people will say, “Don’t actually ask them too many questions. Don’t ask people what they want, because a lot of people don’t really know what they want.” And especially in terms of, “Hey, what product do you want? What feature do you want? That’s the wrong way of doing it. You have to understand what their needs are, and then design a product around that.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think when you ask people, “What would you hearing aids to be more of?” And then they all say, “Oh, more hidden.”
Dave Kemp:
Exactly.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Because the whole relation to what hearing tech is at the moment, of course you want to hide it. I do, every day. It’s not something that you want to show. And so you can’t really take that at face value, because at the end of the day, you haven’t offered an alternative. There is this existing form factor for hearing aids.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
The thing that I find a bit frustrating at the moment is that as we’re going on, people are going, “Wow, honestly, the design for hearing aids, they’re just so beautiful these days.” And it’s like, “Right, okay, but two very contradicting points here. They’re so beautiful, and they’re so hidden, that what’s the point in them even being designed better?”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And realistically, the form factor never changes. I’m talking largely around behind the ear hearing aids, but there’s a bit that goes behind your ear, and that will change from a piece of brown plastic to maybe a piece of shiny black plastic. And that’s not really changing it. And it’s like, you’ve made it a bit nicer, but no one is ever going to see it when someone is wearing it. And so maybe it makes it a little bit more attractive to pick up off the proverbial shelf, but it doesn’t change any sort of public perception around the product for the secondary user, which is not the person wearing it, but everyone else that they interact with.
Dave Kemp:
I love that.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And so I think it really needs to be, you really need to take it apart and understand what do people want. At the end of the day, people don’t want to be ashamed, that’s pretty clear. Something’s already wrong, let’s try and change that bit. So why not just try and design a desirable piece of technology that people would want to wear, and not approach it from “Well, we’ve already got a hearing aid; let’s try and branch out from that.” But try to just really rethink it. What is wearable technology? How should it fit? Well, clearly it needs to be near the ear, but let’s approach it from that angle rather than, oh, it starts behind the ear and let’s just keep changing the color of it and the plastic until people like it. Because that hasn’t worked yet.
Dave Kemp:
I think too, going off of what you said, if you just keep asking consumers what they want, they’re going to just give you what they’ve only imagined. The most famous examples would be Henry Ford, would be they want a faster carriage, or Steve jobs with the iPhone. And so I think that really resonates though, because I do think that it’s something where there hasn’t been an alternative.
Dave Kemp:
And what’s happening today too, broadly speaking, from a macro environment, with hearables and the AirPods revolution, if you will, everybody seems to be walking around with true wireless headphones today. And what does that mean? That means that there’s this gigantic market that people are now catering to. And you look around and we live now in an age where people are just walking around with these things, and nobody really bats an eye. And the next phase of it is that a lot of those earbuds, whether they’re the hearing aid manufacturer owned entities, i.e. GN’s Jabra, or it’s AirPods, and everything in between, they’re all starting to bake in this functionality of having this hearing augmentation. And again, it implies this idea that, well, people are going to be wearing these things for all these different reasons; you might as well, just them hearing augmentation as well. And so there’s this implication there that those folks aren’t ashamed of wearing these things. In fact, it’s become so commonplace that no one bats an eye.
Dave Kemp:
And again, with hearing aids, I understand that you obviously have one option where you can go the route where you want them to blend in with all of the AirPods and stuff that out there. But again, I think going off of your point, we can totally reimagine these things in such a way where they do become, I think, not only cool and appealing, but I think they can be built in such a way where they’re lending itself to all kinds of new use cases that are way more conducive when you have different kinds of form factors, rather than this tiny little RIC hearing aid, with the music quality’s not going to be that great. It’s things like that, where these are features that now people are just accustomed to having in their day to day life. And yet you have limited yourself so much by following that idea of we need to make this thing invisible. Well, there’s trade offs. And I guess my point here is that those trade offs are becoming more obvious than ever before right now.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Definitely, definitely. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s becoming completely normal to see people with things in their ears. And I think that in and of itself is a reason to start riding that wave. I think there is an opportunity here. It’s becoming normal to have things in your ears, so why not use that as a way to make hearing technology something that is more commonplace? Let’s take that as a foot in the door to open that whole opportunity there.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
I think that there’s one thing as well with form factor, with regard to things like AirPods, and that is just there have been a few different attempts to make hearing aids that don’t look hearing aids, but instead look like earbuds.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Now, all I can do is speculate on this, because it’s very hard to predict the future, I’m not sure if you’ve realized, but the challenge that I have with AirPods as hearing aids is how we generally perceive them in public. If you’re wearing your AirPods, you’re listening to music that as far as I’m concerned.
Dave Kemp:
Exactly.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
There is an idea associated with having something in your ears, in a very similar way to, if you, if we’re wearing sunglasses while you’re talking to me, you’re blocking a quite human interaction channel of connecting eyes or connecting ears. And when you have these things covering your ears or covering your eyes, it can almost be perceived a little bit as rude. And so there are a few products that should come out recently that have been more like, “Oh, well, let’s try and ride this wave of earbuds.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But I wonder whether or not this is an issue, to make it look earbuds, for two reasons. One, that idea of it being a little bit maybe rude to be wearing them. And second, because it’s again hiding the fact that they’re hearing aids. I think this is the really important thing. We shouldn’t be trying to disguise it. I’ve had people say, “Hey, why don’t you make them look earrings, or why don’t you make them look earbuds, and no one will know that they’re there?” And that’s not the point. The problem is that no one knows that they’re there.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And you look at the history of glasses over the last 80 years, even relatively recently, glasses where a school kid’s worst nightmare. You would not want to be seen wearing glasses. But today people will wear glasses that don’t even have lenses in purely because they want to be seen wearing them. And this is because we’ve changed what it means to wear glasses. We’ve changed this. People have an opportunity to buy something that adds to their look. And so you have these different styles. And everyone knows that they’re glasses. That’s the important thing. If we were making glasses that were disguised as cowboy hats or something weird like this, then you’re really defeating the objective.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
So I think that’s just an important point, to not try and make it not look hearing aids. We just have to reimagine what hearing aids are. And I think that almost the first step is actually not to use the word hearing aids. I hate that word. To me, negative connotations just with that word.
Dave Kemp:
[crosstalk 00:29:33]. Perfect segue. I’m going to segue to that. But I want to just comment really quick, because I agree with you. I’m very fixated on the big, behavioral and societal perception of everything. I think that the real, in my opinion, amazing thing about AirPods is Apple really ushered in a giant behavior change. It used to be that you never really would walk around with things in your ears unless you were using them for a very specific thing, typically streaming music. And I think that AirPods, it’s now socially acceptable to be wearing these things for extended periods of time. Lots of times people aren’t even listening to anything; it’s like I’m waiting for the next call, or the next time that I pull out my phone and I have video playing, I can stream the audio in.
Dave Kemp:
However, I do think that there will be a point where it becomes too much. And I’m going to be really curious to see what happens when it’s just to what you said, where, will we as a society allow that, more or less? Will that be societally accepted, where you can just walk around with things in your ears, where people have absolutely no idea, “Hello, can I talk to you right now, or are you busy?”
Dave Kemp:
And so I do have this sinking suspicion that at some point there will be pushback to this. And maybe the solution is some sort of either bone conduction form factor, or something that allows for your ears to remain open, some sort of form factor that allows you to straddle your digital and your ambient environment. I do think that it’s just going to present itself to be a problem I think at a certain point, where as it continues to go up and up, they become more ubiquitous, it feels a little dystopian. And this might be odd coming from someone me, that I was really cheering AirPods on, and I still do, because I think that there’s so much good that comes from what Apple’s doing right now. But I do think that we’re going to reach a point where it will become a problem. And it’s going to be really interesting to see how that whole problem is navigated.
Dave Kemp:
And to your point, if the idea is, “Well, we’re going to just make hearing aids that look earbuds,” let’s use the example of a dinner conversation. You go out to a restaurant or something like that. So you’re now targeting somebody that wasn’t going to buy hearing aids for whatever reason, probably because they didn’t want to be seen with them, or maybe it’s because they’re too expensive . And now you’re saying, “All right, well, the alternative is you’re going to wear earbuds in place of that to dinner,” not really realizing that doesn’t that then present the conundrum of are you using those things right now as hearing augmentation? Because very, very few people are going to recognize that that feature exists, that are sitting at the table with you, unless you explicitly make it clear. And so I think it’s a paradox in a way.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Completely. I actually did some user testing on this, which was fun, and made a video, which was a really fun one to make, where I was wearing some prototypes of my 3D printer prototypes of these hearables that I’m designing. And I had them in, and I went up to random people out in the streets and just started conversations with them. And I just asked people, eventually, “Hey, does it bother you that I’m wearing these?” And it was weird. I would say it was about 50/50. Some people were like, “No, not at all.” They could have just been quite polite that I wasn’t annoying them or whatever. But the other 50% were like, “Yeah, actually it’s annoying. Can you take them out? I feel you’re not listening to me.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think my learning from that was really, I think this is an issue with how exposed you are to this. In central Berlin, the tech startup scene, walking around with your AirPods in is as much of a status symbol as it is just normal every day, whatever. That is normal to do it. But then if you are in a circle that is not surrounded by people wearing AirPods all the time, everyone thinks that you’re listening to music.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And so when I said you can’t predict the future, I don’t know if this is going to change. Maybe hearing enhancing tech inside earbuds becomes so commonplace that everyone assumes, “Oh, well, they could also be listening to music.”
Dave Kemp:
[crosstalk 00:34:19].
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Maybe this will happen. Maybe this will happen, I don’t know. But I think it’s a difficult obstacle to climb, at least now, when that doesn’t exist. And maybe it’s only brands the size of Apple that can really create those huge behavioral changes. But even as Apple has overtaken half the world with AirPods, there are still plenty of people who think it’s really rude to be wearing them when you’re talking to them. There’s a lot of people that don’t like AirPods, don’t like Apple, whatever, just because they’ve done very well in a particular subset of the market. There’s a lot of people who still don’t think that.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
So I’m really focusing on a form factor that doesn’t visibly block your ear canals. And I’ve had some success in user testing in this area. I think it will really be interesting to see a bit more, on a wider scale, whether or not this really, really works. That’s what I’m aiming for going forward.
Speaker 3:
I want to go to what you were saying too about language. You had a great video. The way I found Nick was he does these videos. He does these one minute, two minute videos, and I saw them popping up on Twitter. I know you’re on LinkedIn too, I think. And I’m sure you’re on other social channels. But I came across the one that you had where you were talking about the way that we talk about these devices. And for me, that was actually I think when I messaged you and I was like, “I need to get you on my podcast.” Because it was so it was such an insightful thought. And I think it’s something that really needs to be a part of the conversation. Because I do think that the language that we use is such a issue with this whole thing. So, I want to give you an opportunity to really share the basis of that particular video, and the insight that you had there.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Absolutely. I would say this is almost the biggest part. I think there’s two really key things which need to change. One is on a design side, and the second is we need to change the rhetoric, the whole language that we use to describe these products.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
This came from this idea, that I was taking apart Bluetooth earbuds and taking apart hearing aids, just to see what’s inside, what can I take out to put inside my new design? And they’re largely the same thing. Maybe some technologists will disagree with me on specifics, but ultimately the guts of a hearing aid and the guts of a Bluetooth earbud serve a lot of the same purpose, and they do a lot of the same thing.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But the language we use to describe these products is just completely different. There is this idea of having AirPods is a status simple, compared to hearing aids, which something that people are trying to hide. And it’s like, “Wait sec, these are just positioned in a different place in your ear. They’re ultimately the same thing. Why are we talking about them so differently?”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But my favorite thing is how Apple with the new AirPods Pro, they have audio transparency, transparency mode ultimately being that there’s microphones on the outside, they hear the outside sounds, and they pass that through and so you can hear it on the inside. That’s initially how hearing aids work. That is a hearing aid. They’ve ultimately taken what we talk about as hearing aids and then just called it transparency mode, and everyone’s like, “Oh wow, so modern, so cool.” And so it’s another great way of Apple achieving that goal.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But we need to change the way we talk about it, because I think there’s a big problem with just generally, “You have a hearing problem and we are going to help try and get you back to normal.” And if you buy any consumer product, the objective of the marketing is never to get you back to normal. It’s never to point out efficiency in your life and just get you back to normal. It’s all about making you a better version of yourself. It’s like, “Wherever you are right now, that’s fine, you’re you’re okay. We’re going to give you superhuman powers,” in whatever sense that they’re trying to sell.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
That’s how I think we should talk about hearing technology as well. Because we were talking about this before, that the available market, hearing tech, if you look at profound hearing loss, severe, moderate, and mild, is about I think 1.1 billion people with mild hearing loss. And then it goes down to the second largest group, which is moderate hearing loss, and then the third largest, severe and profound.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But really, the severe and profound area of that available market is really small, compared to all of the people who have hearing loss. But we focus so much on this idea of providing a medical solution to a medical problem, that the vast majority of people with hearing loss probably don’t even really come under that definition of needing a medical solution.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ll speak for myself in the sense that I think I have technically a moderate hearing loss, and I don’t want to be told that I’m disabled. I think I’ll make my own judgments of whether or not I feel less able in certain situations, that’s fine, but I don’t want the companies who are ultimately helping me to do that. Instead, I would like there to be a brand that actually supports the idea of, “Hey, don’t you want to have superhuman hearing based on your hearing yesterday? Today it is super human, compared to how it was the day before.”
Dave Kemp:
Yeah, I think that this whole idea of the way in which we describe these things, it’s just like you said, where it’s the design of the devices, the connotation gets reinforced all the time, too, hearing aid, this idea that you’re disabled. We’re pushing. [crosstalk 00:40:39].
Nick Morgan-Jones:
We don’t call glasses seeing aids.
Dave Kemp:
Right. People are running away from this as a solution. If you have mild to moderate hearing loss, good luck convincing somebody to get something that is the exact same packaging, marketing, messaging, everything that you position to somebody that has profound hearing loss, the same demographics. Every message is universal. It’s all the uniform. This is the type of patient. And it doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t resonate with people.
Dave Kemp:
And I think that this whole idea of the language, again, Apple’s a very good example of this, where they get that you can get the same buy-in when you just reframe the way in which you talk about it.
Dave Kemp:
A really good example of this, another one of my favorite folks across the pond, Jeff [Kuleen 00:41:38], who’s been on the podcast a few times, he had an awesome article where he was saying that, similar with the way in which we speak to this, where he was like, “Why is it that this is all about something that you do when you get old? It should be something that you do to preserve your youth, and you talk about it.”
Dave Kemp:
And so that’s, again, positioning it for a different demographic. That’s maybe more inclined for the Baby Boomers. But it’s the same point, which is we keep going at this. It’s the definition of insanity. We just keep going at it the same way. And then here we are, and we look at the market adoption data, and we’re like, “Okay, it’s ticking up words slightly,” and the penetration rate is pretty much the same. And you have all of these anecdotal instances where people talk about how they get the hearing aids, they spend all this money, they’re not really happy, they put them in the drawer and they never wear them again. And then you get grandpa is blasting the TV.
Dave Kemp:
And we’re going round and round and round in circles here. And we aren’t really actually introducing any novel ideas, it feels like. It’s the same form factors.
Dave Kemp:
Now, that’s changing a little bit. I should be fair, because I do think the whole instance of what’s happening with the earbuds and blending the two, and the hearables hearing aid conversions, there are things that are happening. But I do think that it takes a concerted effort for everybody to just rethink this, take a deep breath, take a step back and think about “Are we actually compelling people in any way to wear these? Or are we make it so that we hear this seven year gap, we hear this 10 year gap of people?”
Dave Kemp:
And you’re actually a good instance. You were 10 years old, and you didn’t start actually wearing hearing aids until 19, because of the social stigma that was around it. And so we have to just completely reimagine the ways in which these things look and feel, the ways in which they’re messaged to different demographics, and the ways in which we all talk about it. And I think that that was something that really resonated with me. And I know that you’re just a guy that’s building these things in your bedroom but you’re onto something here, which is, again, this whole idea that we do have to come at a different angle from all of this, in my opinion.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
I completely agree. I think one of the really big challenges at the moment is how do people come across hearing aids at this stage? There’s a bit of a personal journey that you go on when you adopt hearing aids. And there’s a lot of this, exactly this 10 year gap from the point where people find out that they probably need hearing aids to eventually getting it. And the whole customer journey there is okay, you basically then have to go to a doctor and/or an audiologist, ultimately, a medical professional in a white coat and a tie, to confirm that you’ve got a problem with yourself. And then there’s a very long, emotional battle of accepting. And there’s clearly a lot of denial in that 10 year period that, “I actually don’t have a problem. It’s you, you’re mumbling, you’re the problem,” which is really common. And the whole process is, you surrender to the idea of needing hearing aids, rather than being inspired to wear hearing aids.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think this is really the core of the problem. We need to change consumer behavior. And just improving product is not going to do that. Products don’t change consumer behavior, brands do. And at the moment, there is no consumer facing hearing brand. There are a couple of consumer facing hearing brands, but largely speaking, the mammoths in the hearing space, I think if you asked a hundred people who Sonova was, or GN or whatever, just random people, maybe a hundred people would say, “I’ve got no idea who that is.” If you’re lucky, maybe one person might know. There isn’t really this consumer facing presence to change the way people think about hearing technology.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And that’s really what I’d love to try and create, a reason to wear hearing technology, not just to improve your hearing, but to improve everything about the way you interact with people. Because ultimately, hearing comes down to not just being able to hear better, and not needing to hear better. It’s such a personal battle of self confidence when you can’t hear in certain situations. It’s not being able to hear what someone’s saying, and then feeling you look stupid because everyone else heard and you didn’t.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And these are the problems that we need to attack. The hearing is just the part in the middle. The ultimate thing there, the thing that we need to remedy is this sense of self confidence that is being stripped away from anyone who has any hearing problems. And that’s really what I’d to have at the center of Butterfly Audio. That is the problem that we’re solving, is trying to give people an opportunity to be the best version of themself, not just hear better. Because no one really wants that, no one cares about that, no one understands that. Even if you try to educate them on it, that’s not really how a lot of consumer branding works.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think the whole way of things structured at the moment, regulations that prevent consumer brands from having products on the market, well, up until recently, with new, over the counter regulation stuff that’s going to become a little bit more easy. But at the moment, the people who market hearing aids are audiologists, realistically. The manufacturers sell their products to audiologists, and then audiologists tell their patients that they need a hearing aid. And so they’re being told by a medical professional that they have a problem, and they have a solution to their problem. It’s not very inspirational for me, or at least it wasn’t. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to change the way that we talk about hearing technology to the rest of the world.
Dave Kemp:
Yeah. A thought I often have is that, again, you look at a lot of adoption data, a lot of the sales data, and just from my vantage, it feels that really what we talk about when we talk about the patient demographic and hearing aid users and who the audiologist typically is dealing with, it’s the people with profound and severe hearing loss. And don’t get me wrong, yes, of course there are people with moderate hearing loss, there’s people with hidden hearing loss, there’s people with mild hearing loss that they see. So, it’s not as if this is just some generalized statement. But the point is, I think that again, we’ve become so entrenched in this is the way that it is, and we keep coming at it, “Oh well, the way that we’re going to solve, we’re going to increase adoption, and we’re going to do all this,” as we’re going to just introduce lower cost hearing aids.
Dave Kemp:
Well, part of the problem with that is we’ve seen this in the UK, for example, with the NHS, where you can get hearing aids for free.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Great example.
Dave Kemp:
Why are their adoption rates about as similar as ours? So, the problem, it’s just so multifaceted. And I think that what you’ve been saying over the course of this whole conversation, as somebody that actually has dealt with this personally, very much of it is way less about the actual technology and the byproduct of the technology providing you with a sense of sound and being able to restore your hearing in such a way. It’s way more tied to the societal element. It’s way more tied to the feeling that you have as somebody that is falling into one of these buckets, and the ways in which we marginalize them to feel like, “Hey, it’s time for you to go and get your hearing aids because you have a problem.”
Dave Kemp:
And I just again think that in order for us to ever combat these numbers that we always see, and this idea that there’s this gigantic unserved market of people, it’s not as if you just throw more hearing aids at the problem. It’s more like you completely reframe the way in which you talk to the people that you’re compelling to wear these things in a totally different way, not the same way that you talk to somebody that has profound hearing loss. You have to segment these things out.
Dave Kemp:
And it might not be the role of the audiologist. The audiologist role very much might be tied to the people with the higher levels of severity. And it might be something where I, as maybe an audiologist or as a provider, you should be encouraging to people to help them understand the benefits of treating your hearing loss earlier, and positioning it more as preserving what you have now. And I just think that there’s so many different little things that can be done, rather than the one size fits all approach of, “Oh, okay, here. You’re seeing me, now let’s get you some hearing aids.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Totally. And I also want to just touch upon, I don’t want to give the impression to anyone that I think the hearing aid industry is wrong, or that audiologists need to be replaced. Because I think we’re absolutely right, the focus at the moment is on this profound and severe hearing loss. And that requires, I think, more of a medical grade solution to a problem. And that needs to be there. It’s not about trying to get rid of that. It’s really about trying to open up just the unserved market, and have an additional opportunity for audiologists to also suggest to other people.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But ultimately, it’s all the people who never actually go to an audiologist. Because that’s been an interesting conversation I’ve had a couple of times, where I’ve said, “I think we should have visible hearing aids.” And then audiologists have said, “Well, none of my clients would that.” And I was like, “Well, the only people you’ve spoken to are the people who’ve already gone through that journey, and they’ve ended up in your practice. They haven’t spoken to all of the other people that actually never even went to your practice and never even thought about the concept of hearing aids.”
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Because if you struggle to hear people in certain situations, you do everything in your psychological power to tell yourself that you don’t need hearing aids. No one wants them. But if there was another product that was like, “Oh, wait a sec, this is actually the audio equivalent of wearing a cool pair of glasses that doesn’t just improve my hearing, I’m wearing it because it improves how I interact with people,” now that’s an alternative which could be interesting.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And so I’m really not trying to replace the hearing aid market. I just think there is a huge amount of people who could benefit from hearing technology that currently do not have a solution for them.
Dave Kemp:
No, I think that’s spot on. No one is suggesting, like you said, that the audiologist doesn’t have a role. Clearly, they have a role. It’s a very, very important role. But I think that we have to come at this from a different approach. And that’s what we’ve talked about today.
Dave Kemp:
And so as we come to the close here, I’m curious to just understand, again, you’re a hobbyist, you’re doing this in your bedroom, but you’re serious. And what are ways that people that are listening today, engineers, people within the industry, people that are outside of the industry that are just interested in this, what are ways that people can support you? Is it just through connecting with you, or where are you right now with your vision? Because it’s inspiring, and I think that others would love to meet with you and understand more about what it is that you’re doing and where maybe they can help you. So, here’s a chance for you to solicit yourself of where things stand right now, what you’re looking for, and ways that people that are listening might be able to help you.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
So at the moment, I call this a project, but ultimately, I’ve been working on this largely full time for the last eight months. Because I want this to become a business, a brand, something that has a lot of impact. Because I’ve got a very clear vision of where I want this to go, and I think there’s a huge opportunity here.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
I think the challenge is that you can’t just have an idea; you need to pull all the pieces together in a relatively complex industry of audio technology, to make these things an actual reality.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
So at the moment, I’m creating these videos that we’ve been talking about, with an idea of reaching out to as many ultimately potential customers as possible. I’m trying to learn as much as I can from the available market that is currently being underserved. And this is great. I’ve been building up a few thousand followers on different social media channels who are doing that.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
But soon this is going to change from “Hi, I’m Nick, and I’m a hearing aid in my bedroom, to there’s a lot of other people that have also been looking for this, and that’s already been confirmed to me. Countless people have emailed me going, “Finally, someone is actually doing this. Is there any way that I can help?” And it’s awesome.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think, ultimately, if I’m going to go ahead and build a hardware business, this is going to require some skills and probably a fair amount of money to actually make it a reality. So, I’m really looking to just talk to anyone who can try and help move this forward.
Nick Morgan-Jones:
And I think that is going to ultimately require expanding the team. So at the moment, I’m working on this also with a friend, [Gray Dowdy 00:56:10], who’s an awesome industrial designer, who’s been really pulling a lot of the strings when it comes to making a beautiful piece of hardware. But I’m going to need technologists, I think a business co-founder, and ultimately turn this into a business that can actually have an impact. So yeah, my door’s open for anyone who just wants to reach out.
Dave Kemp:
Awesome, man. Nick Morgan Jones, @butterflyaudio_ on Twitter. What other social channels are you real active on?
Nick Morgan-Jones:
Pretty much all of them, but my website, butterflyaudio.co gives an overview of everything on there.
Dave Kemp:
Awesome, man. Such a great conversation. I’m sure this will not be the last time we hear from you. I’m a big fan. I think it’s so cool. Because like you said, there’s people that are reaching out to you saying, “Finally.” I think that’s such motivation to keep going.
Dave Kemp:
This has been such a fun conversation, Nick. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here to the end. And we will chat with you next time. Cheers.
Dave Kemp:
Thanks for tuning in today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future Ear radio. For more content like this, just head over to futureear.co, where you can read all the articles that I’ve been writing these past few years on the worlds of voice technology and hearables, and how the two are beginning to intersect. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll chat with you next time.
Love this!! We need to make hearing issues MORE visible, not less!! And from my personal experience – – most people do not SEE hearing aids. I do not understand the stigma when I can wear bright RED behind the ear aids, with extremely SHORT hair and most folks do NOT realize I wear hearing aids!!!