Sonos iOS update is shockingly bad - first impressions

I’ve never complained about the Sonos app in my life because I have never found anything worth complaining about. You can defend the indefensible as much as you like. I am sure you have heard the expression “perception is reality” - seems that my perception like many others is that this thing is broke. You have a right to disagree in which case get off the thread but don”t tell me my perception is wrong because it differs from yours.

Not trying to dissuade anybody. Just opening people up to the fact that the exact same accusations were leveled at the last app, yet some people feel it is now an ideal. Perception may be reality, but familiarity and muscle memory are as real as perception. Matter of fact, they are a major factor in how one perceives a subjective analysis. I'm not sure why anyone would want to argue with that fact, either.

Hey. I just signed up for an account so I could chime in. It's really bad!!! I actually was showing people the old app as an example of a great user interface. There were so many things you could do in there and it was all easy. Now it's been a few weeks and I still can barely figure out how to do anything at least on the first try. You really should take a look at this and consider reverting. I don't understand why you would mess up something so good.

Personally, I thought the last of the Blue UI iterations were the best - very easy to use, especially on an iPad. In fact, if you use. aPC or Mac - it still looks like that - it was easy to see *everything* on the one page, and easy to access everything... Why change this? The last UI iteration (the black one) wasn't bad, not quite as intuitive, but it was easy enough to figure out quickly.

I installed a Sonos unit for a client a few days back, and my first experience with the new UI was that particular install. I'd not used my own system in a while, so didn't even realise there was a whole new UI.

When it came time to show the client how to use it... I actually had to tell them that I'll come back the next day and explain it because I, myself, couldn't figure it out in the usual 5 minutes it takes me to figure this stuff out. It wouldn't be so bad if the menu bar along the bottom stayed there, but it vanishes, leaving you to figure out how to actually leave the device you are on. When I got home, I got the hang of it in about 20-30 minutes of messing around, but honestly, it shouldn't be that hard. It takes more steps to do stuff - why design something the increases the difficulty of the workflow?

I design and install automation systems (RTI, Crestron), and if I delivered a UI like this, I wouldn't get paid.

I can see potential in it, to be sure, but it needs a few tweaks (like the menu bar staying put on the bottom, or at least being more intuitive to get to)

In terms of the theme - I *really* heat the all white trend, it hurts my eyes, but this is subjective, and all the more reason to offer a light and dark theme.

It honestly ain’t that bad, I got used to the new layout almost immediately. It reminded me of the Apple Music app for iOS. It is more polished and modern. I think people just got super comfortable with the old version and when it is time for a design update, it messed up people’s routine. There are a few suggestions I have, which I’ve created a thread about, but they were the same suggestions I had from the old version.

Is it not ironic that the formerly terrible, useless, non-intuitive, slower, poorly designed UI, huge step backward, too dark, too blue, too many clicks, too many complaints interface is now considered a model of perfection that Sonos should immediately return to? Could it possibly be just a case of familiarity and muscle memory instead of poor UI design?

Be honest.

Honest. OK. "Muscle memory" is how we manage Sonos. It's remembering that the "My Sonos" screen only shows the first 8 alphabetically of any albums/artists/playlists in your favourites, so I instinctively click "My Sonos->Others-See All" to get to my favourites on iOS (considering re-evaluating my favourites to better fit the My Sonos layout). I know that "artists" are called "others" on selected iOS screens. And I know that the desktop app does things completely differently. It's remembering that you can't just click on any album/playlist/song you're browsing and have it "just play", but that's OK, I know which "play all" buttons load up the queue with my selection, and which ones just insert your selection into yesterday's expired queue (Sonos having moved to an ephemeral "fresh queue starts when one expires" model, except when they didn't). I understand that the "play next" buttons have zero value when the queue is expired (and that Sonos can't or won't differentiate between playing, paused and expired queues when it comes to "play selection" buttons). I understand the difference between playing a track, and playing an album from track 6 to the end (awesome feature, should never have been the default action). Does the average new user understand any of this?

I don't have a problem with the general design of the Sonos apps. I actually really like the desktop app, iOS v7 was great, the new one could be great with some tweaking and consistency. But the little things are everything. Especially when Sonos refuses to do anything about them. It's called "User Experience".

Thanks for your honesty. I submit to you that muscle memory is neither hardwired, nor unlearnable, nor unadaptable. Hence the transformation of the old UI from horrible to perfection over the course of time. I'm old enough to remember the mobs with torches and pitchforks that stormed the gates of Corel when they dared to switch from the old Word Perfect control key interface to some new fangled thing called WYSIWYG. Much the same complaints about counter-intuitiveness, longer times to produce product, nobody likes it, horrible interface, etc. were tossed around like hand grenades with far more rancor that even here. Turns out, the old Word Perfect interface was about as intuitive as driving a car with your feet on the steering wheel and your hands on the pedals, but when you've always driven that way, the right way seems wrong.

Now I'm not saying this is the case with this UI, and there are definitely some enhancements to be made (and I too still don't like the queue defaults, but have learned to live with them). But I've found over the years to not trust my first impressions until my muscle memory has time to adapt, and that first impressions are often based on unfamiliarity rather than an unbiased analysis, We are only human.

Look - it was intuitive before, I could work it out in seconds, even if something changed. Over the last couple of days - actually per jgatie prompting, (thx jgatie seriously!) - I have worked out how to do stuff that was causing me problems (simple stuff like changing rooms - woohoo....it reallly works!). But that’s the point - I could not work it out intuitively myself - and I am an aeronautical engineer (yes - worry next time you get on a plane!). This muscle memory stuff may well be true - but the consumers of this technology are not software professionals who spend all day working the software and are paid to learn new tools and layouts, the people using it are my wife, my kids....and sometime aeronautical engineers! If we cannot work it out - we stop trying and do something else. I’ve worked out thanks to jgatie indirect help how to do something I thought was broken. That’s a plus. On the downside it still seems clunky to me and not intuitive.......maybe that home bar fixed across the bottom will solve everything.....but right now, still broken IMHO.

Hence the transformation of the old UI from horrible to perfection over the course of time.
Now I'm not saying this is the case with this UI, and there are definitely some enhancements to be made (and I too still don't like the queue defaults, but have learned to live with them). But I've found over the years to not trust my first impressions until my muscle memory has time to adapt, and that first impressions are often based on unfamiliarity rather than an unbiased analysis, We are only human.

Don't remember the UI being horrible, bought into Sonos late 2009 and watched it improve until the mid-2016 v7 release, which is terrible only because it's still unfinished/abandoned (also, desktop and mobile controllers are diverging because the desktop development seems to have stopped).

Interesting you mention "queue defaults", because they don't currently exist, except maybe in a Sonos blog post. Think about it - as you navigate through browsing down to the album/playlist/etc you want to play, the default play action switches from "ephemeral queue - default is replace and play" to "persistent queue - default is to insert regardless of whether it makes sense in the current playing/paused/expired queue context". We have all learned how to navigate the app, and how to understand whether a given play action does what you intuitively expect, or just random crazy behaviour that has to be learned. This is why I have such an issue with the Sonos UI - not the intended design (which is fine), but the reality of the unfinished software they have spent the last 15 months shipping.

Trust me, when 5.0 was launched, the current "beautiful" design was trashed as bad, if not worse, than the current 8.0. It was bedlam across the two forums that existed at the time. There were even bans due to the hyperbolic reaction. Now that horrible UI is the epitome of perfection. Of course the naysayers who were saying the same nays back then will claim it was they who forced changes that made the 5.0 interface the perfection it became, but in truth they were posting the same "LET US REVERT!!", "I WILL NEVER LIKE THIS INTERFACE!!!", "BURN IT DOWN!!", "YOU CAN'T FIX THIS. IT IS HORRIBLE!!", "BRING BACK THE OLD ONE!!! IT WAS PERFECT!!" as today, and it was the moderates who understood that adapting muscle memory and a few tweaks (major tweaks, but still tweaks) were all it needed. I suggest the same is true today.

As to the queue stuff, you are preaching to the choir.