New Layout interface

All I saw in the update notification was added support for Amazon Alexa. There was no mention of an "updated" interface. Either allow us the option for a dark interface or tell us how to revert to the previous interface.

This is totally nuts! Please Sonos, reissue old interface.

I try to roll with the changes, but I can tell you that this new UI design is not intuitive or friendly. Things take me much longer to figure out. BTW, I do this stuff for a living, so I think I am good point of reference for feedback.

I totally agree, it now takes 3 actions where previously this could hav3 been done with 1

Its utterly horrible... Im also and IT professional and none of the way this works makes sense. total fail sonos

All I saw in the update notification was added support for Amazon Alexa. There was no mention of an "updated" interface. Either allow us the option for a dark interface or tell us how to revert to the previous interface.

Agreed. I would not have updated, even if I had the choice, to this version if I had known how ugly the skin was going to be. I pay way too much money for this platform to have basic, useful functions torn out of the controller app.

All I saw in the update notification was added support for Amazon Alexa. There was no mention of an "updated" interface. Either allow us the option for a dark interface or tell us how to revert to the previous interface.

Agreed. I would not have updated, even if I had the choice, to this version if I had known how ugly the skin was going to be. I pay way too much money for this platform to have basic, useful functions torn out of the controller app.Please would you confirm which basic, useful functions have been torn out of the controller? Thx

Don’t expect an answer to that John because zero functionality has been removed. This is a bit bewildering to me.

Me too.

Sonos fanboys splitting hairs as usual...

The function to skip tracks and change volume has been removed in portrait mode on the iPad when not in the zone player screen (I.e. when the black bar is active).

Sonos fanboys splitting hairs as usual...

The function to skip tracks and change volume has been removed in portrait mode on the iPad when not in the zone player screen (I.e. when the black bar is active).

I suggest that is a legitimate suggestion for improvement to be included in the coming revision tweaks that Sonos has promised, and all of us "fanboys" have admitted are necessary. So if your insults are to be taken literally, you must be a fanboy too. Welcome to the club! 😉

Sonos fanboys splitting hairs as usual...

The function to skip tracks and change volume has been removed in portrait mode on the iPad when not in the zone player screen (I.e. when the black bar is active).i think to your long list of conditions you have to add 'and the queue is hidden'.

If you think that amounts to basic functions being torn out of the controller....

I didn’t ever mention a long list so pipe down.

I was responding to the point that ‘zero functionality has been removed’, which is an incorrect statement.

I totally agree that the new UI is awful. Simple dropdown to pick the room you are in seems to be gone. My wife only uses one of the rooms in which we have systems and when she got up early in the morning (5:00am) to turn her room & station on she ended up turning on music in another room at a very load volume. I was listening to that room the day before - why was her app defaulted to the last room in which I was listening.

I tried to listen to a talk radio station on I Heart that I had set up and listened to many times and now I get a "can't find music" message.

Huge Icons and a generally awful look. How can I go back to two updates ago? Very unhappy! Lots of $$ for this poor quality app. -Nate-

The talk radio thing is entirely unconnected to the app which is just a controller.

I suspect you are trying to use the quick grouping facility to control rooms instead of the proper Rooms screen. I may be wrong, because I cannot see what you are doing. But you might try touching the Rooms button on the navigation bar

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5LY6yD3BW7adkstOHVDVzZUMUE/view?usp=sharing

I'm certainly not a fan of the new UI - I never complained about it here but it made me shut off music for a while the first few times. It's incredibly unintuitive at least when coming from the previous UI. There is genuine "home" any longer and I'm never sure how to access a particular screen depending where I'm at in the interface now. It seems the icons for My Sonos, Rooms, Browser etc *want* to be static and always available, like a tool-belt sort of setup, but they aren't.
Slowly I've gotten used to it and am not as frustrated continuously as I was initially, but it still takes me longer to do pretty much everything than it did previously. For the first time ever, I've found myself using the Spotify app to control the speakers about half the time, which is saying something because I always found the Spotify UI to be a chaotic mess.
This will irritate some folks, but I genuinely feel like this is developer boredom - I spent several years in a company in which the lead devs very much enjoyed UI design and very much did NOT enjoy bug fixes and the more mundane background stability tasks needed, code efficiency etc.... design is fun and gratifying unlike those latter thing, and they were allowed to set their own design upgrades release milestones that were not really tied to the functionality of the system itself, just a desire to make it prettier in their eyes, and more "current" .... That company eventually failed for reasons that had nothing to do with teh design and redesign of a UI, but because so many other back-end areas had been neglected for too long.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the case here, but I AM saying that viewing this update for the first time gave me the same feeling I got in many internal meetings back then that showcased a brand new UI release/flavor that somehow had taken precedence over the real technical issues still unadressed... it was a sinking sort of feeling, beneath a feeling of "oooh that's pretty - that's a slick new way to do that".
Ramble over.

Wherever you are in the interface, the way to get where you want is to go back to the navigation bar. I agree, and have said many times, that this should be permanently in view. I believe that will come soon. In the meantime it is just a swipe down away.

I didn’t ever mention a long list so pipe down.

I was responding to the point that ‘zero functionality has been removed’, which is an incorrect statement.

So confirming that you are the one splitting hairs.

Because the amount of hyperbole that has been around the impact of this update......... it is a touch over the top.

Wherever you are in the interface, the way to get where you want is to go back to the navigation bar. I agree, and have said many times, that this should be permanently in view. I believe that will come soon. In the meantime it is just a swipe down away.

It isn't as bad as it's made out to be. I agree the nav bar needs to be accessible the same way each time. In my experience though, that is not the case which is the problem. If you're in any settings menu, or the room grouping screen, the nav bar is not always just a swipe-down away; you must make a selection, or tap Cancel, or tap Done, or tap the Back button twice, depending on the situation. Sometimes, often, the swipe-down doesn't apply.
Moreover, from the three short tutorial screens that introduced this update upon its installation, as well as the video that introduces/explains it here on the Sonos main site, there is no mention of the "swipe down" gesture to access that nav bar. I didn't even realize that this gesture was available (tapped the Arrow in the upper-left instead to that point) until MUCH later, at which point the whole interface made much more sense sense to me. I found it on my own, accidentally. That may sound a bit dense but it isn't something necessarily obvious depending on the person and whatever their previous app experiences are as to whether or not a UI is intuitive. The Nav bar is this UI's new "achor" as it were, but that anchor sort of floats around a bit. I like the interface more than I did at first, but it does need some tweaking.

I was shopping for a new soundbar, and have for the time being ruled out the playbar as an addition to our current setup, based on the latest revision of the controller. I'm going oldschool with a Dali speaker in stead.

I have also stopped recommending Sonos to friends, as I can no longer vouch for the user friendliness of the new design.

Please stop screwing with the interface. This is bad, and my children can no longer intuitively control their 3's.

It's horrible. Who in the UI world would have a room screen that says 'no music' and no way to solve that problem from that same screen?? Madness! Bring back the previous interface.

I’ve been using Sonos a long while and this is a terrible interface - it is very non-intuitive, confusing and inefficient. How was it tested before release?? Please return the last interface.