I have been a Sonos user and installer for about 10 years now, and I just have to air this out once and for all --frankly, the user interface of the current phone app (both for android and iphone) is the most poorly designed version yet. I don't wish to offend anyone in Sonos, but I wish to report that all my clients have complained to me about it. It seems that it was created to make it as simple and plain as possible. Well it does, and it also looks very crude. I wish you guys could make a much better and sleek version of it because it doesn't complement the awesome system. Thanks.
P.S. You could start with changing the white background.
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My sentiments as well. While all things are under consideration, there must be some underlying reason for this minimalist approach. The satellite boys D&D have been noodling with their interfaces as well. SONOS used to be known for its colorful, even soulful look, and whether it was blues and blacks or reds and greens it was smooth and delightful to demonstrate. Music is all about feelings and SONOS got it. Now all black and white I don't get it.
I have been a user of the Sonos app on PC, Android and Ipad for many years and I have to agree with the comments above. The UI designers seem to have lost their way with random change just for changes sake.
From the v5 UI onwards the design has lost its intuitive nature to be replaced by seemingly random bundles of capabilities under new tab entries. - nothing is consistent any longer and it has the smell of an agile development with pieces of code developed in isolation with no clear overall design authority in charge. Its almost as if you gave the browse tab to one team to develop, the Rooms tab to another and so on.
There are numerous examples, here is just a couple of pet hates....
1) when in the rooms tab on Android, I can view and clear the current queue but I cannot browse for new music to add without navigating away from the room to "My sonos" or "Browse" tabs.
2) When in Browse I want to be able to browse and select from my playlists - I can't do that without navigating elsewhere
3) I used to be able to hand my controller over to a guest and let them locate music of their choice and control the queue and the Sonos device volume without any help from me but now they give up and just hand the controller back - none are impressed and several have commented that they find the whole thing too confusing and hence WOULD NOT BUY ONE (Sonos Marketing and accounting bods take note! )
I sense its time for a fresh start and get the designers to think about the whole UI from a typical end users persepective with an emphasis on intuitiveness.
From my perspective I want to start by
1) selecting the device / room / group I want to control and
2) then browse for the music I want to play (from ANY Source including playlists )
3) then have view and control over the Queue and whats playing (volume , Bass, Treble etc)
or the order of 1 and 2 could be switched if you prefer
The only UI that you have left that makes any sense is the PC version which is sill intuitive if not particularly modern in its design. You ruined the IPAD UI back in v6 when you showed all the hallmarks of trying to cut development costs and keep the UI in sync with the phone version which just led to wasted real estate and a confusing design for a tablet :?.
From the v5 UI onwards the design has lost its intuitive nature to be replaced by seemingly random bundles of capabilities under new tab entries. - nothing is consistent any longer and it has the smell of an agile development with pieces of code developed in isolation with no clear overall design authority in charge. Its almost as if you gave the browse tab to one team to develop, the Rooms tab to another and so on.
There are numerous examples, here is just a couple of pet hates....
1) when in the rooms tab on Android, I can view and clear the current queue but I cannot browse for new music to add without navigating away from the room to "My sonos" or "Browse" tabs.
2) When in Browse I want to be able to browse and select from my playlists - I can't do that without navigating elsewhere
3) I used to be able to hand my controller over to a guest and let them locate music of their choice and control the queue and the Sonos device volume without any help from me but now they give up and just hand the controller back - none are impressed and several have commented that they find the whole thing too confusing and hence WOULD NOT BUY ONE (Sonos Marketing and accounting bods take note! )
I sense its time for a fresh start and get the designers to think about the whole UI from a typical end users persepective with an emphasis on intuitiveness.
From my perspective I want to start by
1) selecting the device / room / group I want to control and
2) then browse for the music I want to play (from ANY Source including playlists )
3) then have view and control over the Queue and whats playing (volume , Bass, Treble etc)
or the order of 1 and 2 could be switched if you prefer
The only UI that you have left that makes any sense is the PC version which is sill intuitive if not particularly modern in its design. You ruined the IPAD UI back in v6 when you showed all the hallmarks of trying to cut development costs and keep the UI in sync with the phone version which just led to wasted real estate and a confusing design for a tablet :?.
I made the same observations during beta testing this. I can”t believe they let this out the door.
Beta testing? Give that app to anyone of any age and they will stop using it after 2 minutes. That should give you your answer. Move outside your bubble into the real world,
It is not rocket science- there are only a few ways that users operate.
1 choose room(s) then choose music
2. Select music then choose which room(s) to play it in.
Beta testing? Give that app to anyone of any age and they will stop using it after 2 minutes. That should give you your answer. Move outside your bubble into the real world,
It is not rocket science- there are only a few ways that users operate.
1 choose room(s) then choose music
2. Select music then choose which room(s) to play it in.
Beta testing? Give that app to anyone of any age and they will stop using it after 2 minutes. That should give you your answer. Move outside your bubble into the real world,
It is not rocket science- there are only a few ways that users operate.
1 choose room(s) then choose music
2. Select music then choose which room(s) to play it in.
But I have said all this before on other threads and I will soon get a further bashing for being a 'fanboy' or 'denying people a voice'. But nobody has yet explained to me what is difficult or illogical about the above few taps.
The app needs work. I suspect it is a bigger shift for tablet users than phone users. But it really isn't unusable.
I totally agree with all of you here... A giant step backward for Sonos... I'm a long time user...I have 18 devices... I called Sonos recently because my system recently started cutting out, especially using Pandora, in middle of a song only to start another one... Anyhow, when I asked the Tech Sonos what he thought of the new App interface... There was silence on the phone... I asked again... still silence... I asked are you still here... He said yes... did you hear my question? He said Yes... I said, well do you have an opinion? He said I really have nothing good to say about it... he continued and said that he gets a lot of complaints about it and he agrees with almost all of it... Sonos knows that they screwed up... I think it's a matter of time before they "deep 6" 8.x version... it just can't come soon enough...
Intuitive and efficient user interfaces are really difficult to achieve. SONOS, at first, excelled. Interesting to see a product management team that replaces such a brilliant interface with one which is non-intuitive, inefficient, and encumbered. My advice to the SONOS PM team, accept you've egregiously erred with this misguided experiment and revert back to your former brilliance, please.
Totally agree. It’s very interesting to note how Sonos got so much so so right in the early hardware / software days. The hardware continues to be excellent. The software just gets worse and worse. Actually, to correct that — the interface gets worse and worse. Bring some professional designers in, spruce up the look, change the colours and move a few things around and we will be back in the ‘ol glory days.
Sorted.
Tomorrow I will start work on world peace.
Andrew
Sorted.
Tomorrow I will start work on world peace.
Andrew
[quote=John B]But nobody has yet explained to me what is difficult or illogical about the above few taps.
The app needs work. I suspect it is a bigger shift for tablet users than phone users. But it really isn't unusable.
I'll give you an example. Swiping down from the top to minimise the room. A lot of the time you end up swiping the OS settings page instead which as you can imagine is very frustrating.
I'm a long time user of Sonos (three devices) and love them, but this new UI is frustrating as hell. My wife got to grips with the previous UI and there were no complaints, but now......
We were thinking of getting another device but this puts that idea under doubt. I do hope Sonos can review the UI and / or poll their users in more depth for some improvements.
The app needs work. I suspect it is a bigger shift for tablet users than phone users. But it really isn't unusable.
I'll give you an example. Swiping down from the top to minimise the room. A lot of the time you end up swiping the OS settings page instead which as you can imagine is very frustrating.
I'm a long time user of Sonos (three devices) and love them, but this new UI is frustrating as hell. My wife got to grips with the previous UI and there were no complaints, but now......
We were thinking of getting another device but this puts that idea under doubt. I do hope Sonos can review the UI and / or poll their users in more depth for some improvements.
John B wrote:
"...But nobody has yet explained to me what is difficult or illogical about the above few taps."
- The bottom navigation bar disappears completely on the play screen, settings, others. Get any book on GUI design and look up "anchor"
- To find EQ from the play screen requires no less than 6 taps through screens with multiple choices! One requires a map?!? (SONOS has always had an up-front EQ link on the PC controller but has eliminated this again from the app... backwards)
- Taking the safari through the settings sub-menus (like EQ) require backing out of each screen to get back to home... this is barbaric... the sophistication level of a BIOS menu. Again GUI design 101, Look up "exit"
Just some of my favorites, but please let's stop the pose John. The inarguable proof, cited in this thread, is that before version 5 you could hand-off the controller to a child and say "knock yourself out" and they wouldn't come back for hours. Now, people just say "YUK" and set it down.
"...But nobody has yet explained to me what is difficult or illogical about the above few taps."
- The bottom navigation bar disappears completely on the play screen, settings, others. Get any book on GUI design and look up "anchor"
- To find EQ from the play screen requires no less than 6 taps through screens with multiple choices! One requires a map?!? (SONOS has always had an up-front EQ link on the PC controller but has eliminated this again from the app... backwards)
- Taking the safari through the settings sub-menus (like EQ) require backing out of each screen to get back to home... this is barbaric... the sophistication level of a BIOS menu. Again GUI design 101, Look up "exit"
Just some of my favorites, but please let's stop the pose John. The inarguable proof, cited in this thread, is that before version 5 you could hand-off the controller to a child and say "knock yourself out" and they wouldn't come back for hours. Now, people just say "YUK" and set it down.
It appears that there hasn't been so many complaints about a Sonos app as this current one. I really hope, Sonos, that your design team does something drastic about this. Sometimes trying too hard to be hip could be a bad thing.
Agree with many of the comments. As one who has worked in software development for the past 20+ years managing both development and UX teams, I know it's not an easy process to come up with an interface that feels intuitive to the user, so with that in mind, let me offer these comments on how Sonos' UX team could make an already great sounding and extremely useful product substantially better:
1. Consistency between the mobile and PC interfaces. I don't want to have to learn a different interface to change a room setting or music service just because I happen to be accessing the Sonos system from my MacBook Pro or my iPhone. I shouldn't have to search for where the "alarm" feature is on each platform or follow a completely different process to add a music service. And speaking of adding music services...
2. Could you please add a "delete music service" option? It's great to be able to be able to explore new music services or try out a free trial offer for 30 days, but after I decide that it's not for me and I don't want to continue that service there's no way to remove it from my menu of options. Which leads me to my biggest gripe...
3. Why can I not globally search for an artist across different music services on the PC interface like I can on the phone interface? Frequently, I'll find one service might have part of an artist's catalog but then another service will have different albums because the artist switched record labels over the course of their career. Being able to globally search multiple services on the mobile platform gives me access to everything. While conversely...
4. Why can't I switch to a "line-in" input for a room (when I want to listen to something that is only available on a CD and not on any streaming service) from my phone like I can on the PC interface?
5. Finally, I realize you are at the mercy of the lousy, error-filled metadata that is associated with many of the music streaming services, but could you please optimize your search algorithms or license a better one so when I search on a classical composer like, for example, Mozart, I don't have to try ten different variations to find the recording I'm looking for (e.g., Mozart, Wolfgang Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, W.A. Mozart, etc.).
Thanks!
1. Consistency between the mobile and PC interfaces. I don't want to have to learn a different interface to change a room setting or music service just because I happen to be accessing the Sonos system from my MacBook Pro or my iPhone. I shouldn't have to search for where the "alarm" feature is on each platform or follow a completely different process to add a music service. And speaking of adding music services...
2. Could you please add a "delete music service" option? It's great to be able to be able to explore new music services or try out a free trial offer for 30 days, but after I decide that it's not for me and I don't want to continue that service there's no way to remove it from my menu of options. Which leads me to my biggest gripe...
3. Why can I not globally search for an artist across different music services on the PC interface like I can on the phone interface? Frequently, I'll find one service might have part of an artist's catalog but then another service will have different albums because the artist switched record labels over the course of their career. Being able to globally search multiple services on the mobile platform gives me access to everything. While conversely...
4. Why can't I switch to a "line-in" input for a room (when I want to listen to something that is only available on a CD and not on any streaming service) from my phone like I can on the PC interface?
5. Finally, I realize you are at the mercy of the lousy, error-filled metadata that is associated with many of the music streaming services, but could you please optimize your search algorithms or license a better one so when I search on a classical composer like, for example, Mozart, I don't have to try ten different variations to find the recording I'm looking for (e.g., Mozart, Wolfgang Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, W.A. Mozart, etc.).
Thanks!
As "just a user" with no software design experience. I find the latest revision of the iPhone so frustrating, I don't use it. I am in IT so a logical thinker by nature. I find nothing intuitive on this app. moving from room to room or changing from one source to another in the same room. Just a train wreck from my perspective.
I really like the newest version that came out last week.
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