Take Heed Sonos Devs
While you sit in your conference rooms and debate the 8.x app with corporate speak sentences like "They will get used to it" and "This happens every major upgrade" and "Scale-able, cross-platform modern blah blah blah.....".
One thing that has never happened before with my Sonos house happened last night. And it is important you realize the significance.
I had three couples over for drinks and I put on one of my playlists and then I turned the ipad over and placed it under my bar. I did it without thinking - it just seemed less distracting that way.
This morning i did think about it however. I had never done that before. I tend to hand off the Ipad and let guests marvel at my wonderful Sonos system. I let them pick music from the seemingly endless inventory of tunes from Google and Apple. Soon old songs are played that bring back great memories - people sing and some might even dance.
It almost always turns into a "So what is this Sonos thing?".
Last night. That did not happen.
The new interface is just confusing enough for new users that i have to give a tutorial I didn't feel like giving a tutorial.
The aesthetic is a bit too glaring and, in my opinion, not as attractive as it once was.
Your app is more than a tool. It is a showpiece. And we, the owners of Sonos dearly love to show it off. The speakers, yeah, they the Wow factor when the rich sound fills the house but when a new user touches the app and finds any song at the end of their fingertips, you can almost see the excitement in their eyes.
So while we can debate endlessly of 8.x being intuitive or not intuitive or 8.x being an evolutionary step forward or backward, one thing is a stone cold fact: six people did not fall in love with Sonos last night.
And THAT is something you should worry about.
One thing that has never happened before with my Sonos house happened last night. And it is important you realize the significance.
I had three couples over for drinks and I put on one of my playlists and then I turned the ipad over and placed it under my bar. I did it without thinking - it just seemed less distracting that way.
This morning i did think about it however. I had never done that before. I tend to hand off the Ipad and let guests marvel at my wonderful Sonos system. I let them pick music from the seemingly endless inventory of tunes from Google and Apple. Soon old songs are played that bring back great memories - people sing and some might even dance.
It almost always turns into a "So what is this Sonos thing?".
Last night. That did not happen.
The new interface is just confusing enough for new users that i have to give a tutorial I didn't feel like giving a tutorial.
The aesthetic is a bit too glaring and, in my opinion, not as attractive as it once was.
Your app is more than a tool. It is a showpiece. And we, the owners of Sonos dearly love to show it off. The speakers, yeah, they the Wow factor when the rich sound fills the house but when a new user touches the app and finds any song at the end of their fingertips, you can almost see the excitement in their eyes.
So while we can debate endlessly of 8.x being intuitive or not intuitive or 8.x being an evolutionary step forward or backward, one thing is a stone cold fact: six people did not fall in love with Sonos last night.
And THAT is something you should worry about.