- Intro -

Grouping experience for achieving immersive sound.

My Role

UX Designer. I was working with another UX designer who is the lead designer for the physical speaker experience.

Goal

Stable speaker groups that users can easily create, play music on, and share with friends.

Challenges

To group speakers, users have to use the app.

The app was the only way that users group speakers.

The user interface for grouping the speakers is challenging.

The app UI for grouping was not self-explained. Users had hard time to figure it out.

Turn off speakers, the groups dismiss.

It was frustrating that users had to group speakers again if they turned off the speakers.

Connect wrong speakers, the groups dismiss.

The speaker group was engineered in a broadcaster/receiver model. Users had to connect to the broadcaster. If they connected to the receiver, the group dismissed. It was especially frustrating when the speakers were identical which was pretty common among the users. And it made sharing the speaker groups with friends extremely hard.

Potential privacy violation.

Users could group strangers speakers without their permission. It was designed in this way as UE speakers were not prevailed. It was very unlikely that their neighbors also had UE speakers.

Solutions

Group speakers without the app.

A dedicated grouping button for the next generation speakers. Users could group the new gen speakers without using the app.

Easily group speakers via the app.

Redesigned the grouping UI for the app which was very easy use.

Permanent speaker group.

Based on what we have learned from the users through the in-field researches, we prioritize the needs of permanent groups. “Group it and forget it”. Users only need to group the speakers once. For the next, just one tap, the speakers will come back to the group.

Play music on any speaker.

A new model that allowed users to connect to any speakers within the group to play music on the group. Users didn’t need to figure out the broadcaster anymore.

- Concept -

Experience

Permanent Speaker Groups

Speaker groups would not dismiss unless through the grouping button on the speakers or through the app.

 

Easy Sharing

To help users easily share the speaker groups with friends and families, they can connect any speaker within the group to play music on all of them.

Prototype

Link.

Group via the App

 

Easy to group

Instead of using a configuration list (such as Sonos or Apple’s Airplay 2), we'd like to make the user interface more engaging and fun to use.

The speaker group is permanent. They just need to group them once.

 
 

Easy to ungroup

For users that only need temporary groups, they can easily ungroup them.

Process

Prioritize Use Cases

In the real world, we couldn’t satisfy every single use case perfectly. So we gotta prioritize them. Then we can evaluate and pick the best idea.

Here is the Primary Use Case.

Here are the other valuable use cases.

Ideation

We always try to come up with practical and crazy idea. The goal is to make the experience effortly and magical.

Here is the final proposal.

Here are the other interesting idea.

Here are some app UI exploration coming out from the process.

Thanks!