Arturo Ui, Electric Guitars and Hearing Aids

The Royal Shakespeare Company are currently running an excellent production of Brecht’s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I can thoroughly recommend.   What I didn’t expect when I went to see it last week, is that I’d also learn quite a few useful things about user experience design for hearing aids and assisted listening.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is  a parable of Hitler’s rise to power, conceived as a parallel story based on Chicago gangsters fighting for control of the vegetable trade.  It’s an important piece, not least because of the warning of its final line “The beast that bore him is in heat again”.  But enough of UI for the moment.  Here’s what I learnt about User Interfaces for hearing aids.

Just before the performance started, I became aware of a conversation behind me, where a man was complaining to his partner about the difficulty of using his assistive listening device to tune in to the correct audio stream for the performance.  The theatre at Stratford has put a lot of effort into assistive support, with both telecoil inductive loops and assistive audio headsets which patrons can borrow during a performance.  That makes sense, as it has one of the older audience demographics.  Every time I venture up to Stratford, I feel that I’m in the youngest quartile of the audience (and I’m in my seventies).  Based on the general statistics for hearing loss, that means that there are probably at least 150 audience members at each show who would benefit from some kind of hearing reinforcement.  Which is presumably why the theatre is equipped with a telecoil system.  Except, when you walk in to the auditorium, you see:

There was a sign telling hearing loop users that the theatre’s telecoil system had been turned off.  The reason is that the production uses electric guitars, and apparently their pickups are affected by the audio from the telecoil’s inductive loop.  Who knew?  This is presumably a particular problem in any auditorium with a thrust stage, which would be most theatres that have tried to reproduce a Shakespearean setting.  In Shakespeare’s day, audiences wouldn’t generally have lived long enough to develop hearing loss.  And certainly not long enough to have the chance to experience an electric guitar.  But those messages don’t seem to have got through to modern theatre designers.

The RSC do offer alternative audio enhancement headsets, which is what the gentleman behind me appeared to be struggling with, but I wondered how many of them they had available.  I suspect it was probably fewer than the number of audience members wearing hearing aids.  What’s more interesting would be knowing when the director was told that if he wanted electric guitars it would prevent hearing aid wearers using the building’s telecoil?  Was that pointed out at the start, or was a sticking plaster applied at the end?

As the lights went down, another issue presented itself.  The gentlemen to my right, who was presumably wearing hearing aids or earbuds obviously wanted to adjust the volume, but needed to do it using the app on his phone.  While his wife frantically whispered to him to turn the display off, or put it away, you could feel others around him tensing and inwardly demonising anyone who turned on their phone screen during a performance.

In both cases, you can’t blame the user.  Neither should have been put in this position, and were only there because nobody thought through the user experience.  I’ve worked on wireless specifications for many years, and most of the time they’re predominantly written by protocol engineers – low-level hardware programmers who don’t generally have direct experience of the way that products are likely to be used.  That’s why we have these issues.  I’ve been heavily involved with Auracast – the new Bluetooth audio standard which is designed for hearing reinforcement and audio sharing.  Although I don’t wear a hearing aid, I carry around a small telecoil headset to see how often inductive loops work, and it’s not been an edifying experience.  Often, they don’t.  My hope is that Auracast, which will work with both consumer earbuds and headsets, as well as hearing aids, will provide an easier experience, but many more segments of industry need to talk to each other if it’s is going to become a really seamless experience.

The final piece of learning came at the end of the interval.  The cast of gangsters, led by Arturo Ui ,were roaming round the audience trying to “persuade” people to sign up to their protection racket.  They’d obviously worked out likely situations to let them pounce on victims, one of which was to look out for anyone using a mobile phone just before the start of the second Act.  Mark Gatiss, who was giving an incredibly impressive and menacing performance as Arturo Ui, crept up on the man behind me, who was setting up his assisted listening device, presumably thinking it was a mobile phone.  As his Arturo Ui persona launched into a spiel about the evils of using mobile phones in a theatre he was rebutted with a firm “that’s my hearing aid”, followed by an ongoing commentary berating the fact that it didn’t seem to work.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor involved with a piece of audience participation slink away so quickly, as Mark Gatiss recognised the impending rabbit hole of getting trapped in in technical support.  In this instance, being Ui trumped the prospect of UI explanations.

It was fascinating to see these little incidents, as they highlighted how much more needs to be done to make hearing assistance seamless.  The evening illustrated a succession of little problems that cause unnecessary frustration because designers, whether of products, apps or service infrastructure, haven’t thought things through properly.  None of the problems were insoluble, or even particularly difficult to fix, but there are still design and societal issues that need to be taken into account.

As for the show, it is a brilliant production.  With luck, it will transfer and be more widely seen.  One other positive is that this was the first time that I’ve seen an actor on stage wearing hearing aids, other than in a part that specifically required them.  I’d not thought about just how rare it is to see anyone wearing them on stage or screen, where they should be as common as glasses.  Sadly, they’re not.  It ended up being a very enjoyable evening, providing so much more to think about beyond the very important political message of the play.