Some of you might have questions when you have had a week to get to know the new Sonos App interface. Because of that, we want to give you all a chance to ask some of the people who were integral in its creation and design, the questions that have come to mind while you have used the app.
Diane Roberts, Senior Director of Software Development
Kate Wojogbe, Senior Director of User Experience
Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management
It will be hosted on the 14th of May from 11:00 until 14:00 GMT -07.
But instead of me telling you what they do and what their role with the app update has been, here are their own introductions:
Diane
Diane Roberts is the Senior Director of Software Engineering and Product Management at Sonos responsible for the Sonos Apps. Her group of cross-disciplinary teams build Configuration, Control, and Content experiences on a foundation of Core mobile application technologies. She received dual Bachelors’ of Science in Computer Science and Music from WPI. Diane holds 6 granted patents as a co-inventor.
Kate
As Senior Director of User Experience, Kate leads the UX team responsible for Sonos’ home audio hardware, software, and app user experiences. This includes user interfaces on speakers and soundbars, setup for hardware and services, first and third party content experiences, and a variety of methods of control of the Sonos system. Kate graduated from the University of California Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design.
Tucker
Tucker Severson is the Director of Product Management and leads the PM team responsible for the Sonos Apps. Tucker received his BA from Bates College and his MBA from the University of Vermont.
We will do our best to answer as many of your questions as possible within the 3-hour window, but we can’t promise to answer every question, especially those you know we can’t discuss.
But if we see a question repeated or a reply getting a lot of likes, don’t worry. We will prioritize those to ensure that many people get the answers they seek.
Remember, we can’t talk about things on the roadmap - but if you have questions or feedback about the app redesign, want to know more about our panelists, like their background or favorite band, then the sky is the (cough cough.. NDA) limit!
Thank you, everyone, for participating. We covered as many of the most asked questions as possible. We know tracking the responses wasn't as easy as we had hoped. But we wanted to let the community air frustrations and have their questions answered.
I got a lot of DMs during the AMA, and I will be sure to answer them when I can. Thanks for reaching out!
Keith and I will work on recapping all the questions and feedback we have responded to, and we will update the post here when that is complete. If we didn't get to your question, don't worry. Keith and I are grabbing all the feedback from this thread, even the things we didn't respond to, and ensuring the right people will see the message. This was the first time we created a live AMA in the community, and we learned a lot for future AMAs.
We appreciate all the feedback and questions you gave through this AMA. It helps us understand your most significant feedback and your reasoning. We hear you, and we will ensure the right teams get your feedback. They are listening.
We look forward to seeing your reactions to our future app developments. We hope you all appreciate the work our developers are putting into making the app as fast and easy to use as possible for the general user.
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Here is a ridiculous political answer. That is simply impossible! This new App is a Crap!!!! Missing functions!!!! Without any notice before this downgradew! :
What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?
@GuitarSuperstar
Thanks for asking. We have all been deeply invested in this project for a long time. We are all Sonos owners. Many people on the team had Sonos in their homes before they joined the team. We all use the experience every day.
Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music.
We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.
Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.” The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.
“We did go through multiple phases of assessing the current S2 structure, modified versions of it, and the tabless version that we have today. Our work has engaged existing and new Sonos users throughout, and we have pursued the path that felt the most useful and intuitive to the largest number of users overall. We understand that every user is an individual with unique needs and circumstances. My hope is that your specific needs can be addressed by personalizing your home screen so your Sonos Favorites module shows up front and center on your home screen. Doing so should make this the first thing you see when launching the app. A single tap should take you to the full view of that collection.”
Really, You can't personalise anything. I added my Apple Music Albums as a pinned collection but only the first 100 show up. You can't organise the Sonos favourites which is frankly a mess, and the app takes at least three times as long to load as the old one. I definitely won't be b buying more sonos products, and if it weren't for the fact that there will be a glut on eBay I’d be selling mine now.
What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?
p…] Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music.
We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.
Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.” The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.
This seems tone deaf.
You’re right, there’s always going to be some degree of negative reception when making changes — “who moved my cheese?”
The question is whether the improvements are a bigger step forward than the limitations are a step back. Are there going to be more positive responses, or negative ones?
Personally, I’m in the Steve Jobs mindset of, paraphrasing, “design isn’t how a thing looks, it’s how a thing works.” If a product works well, then people can overlook the interface shortcomings; if the product doesn’t work well, then no amount of interface glitziness can make up for that.
Personally, I have almost never given a damn that a smartphone/tablet app lets me rearrange interface widgets. I just… do not ever want to do that. But it’s infuriating that my speaker app no longer lets me set up & add to a queue! This is a fundamental feature for a music oriented product: “what am I listening to now, what do I want to listen to next?” We can’t add things to the queue anymore, but the ability to faff around with the management interface is supposed to be a consolation prize?
It has to have been obvious to people there that the new version broke more than it fixed. This is a radical rewrite of an established product, and it has a laundry list of shortcomings compared to its predecessor, as many posts here, on Reddit, and elsewhere have documented.
And so, my question:
Does anyone there have veto authority on a bad release?
How bad do the bugs need to have been to compel someone sufficiently senior to step back and say that this product, as it currently exists, was not good enough to release to the public with the Sonos name? In this chat, a Sonos employee has admitted to the discovery of a last minute data corruption bug, and the response was to deactivate a major feature, rather than fix the bug or (surely better!) delay the release. Why??
Some in this forum have suggested that launching a new S3 app could’ve made sense. This seems like a good idea, because it could have offered users a preview of where Sonos is going, while retaining the ability to stick with the more or less stable S2 app until the user decides to switch over.
Of course, it’s too late to do that now, alas, but surely in hindsight it has to be clear that this would’ve been a better way forward.
At this point, we’re all stuck. Your users are left with a semi-functional system, and your software team is stuck with a huge backlog of bugfixes to rush out the door.
Good luck. You need it.
Hi @Absolute40
It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.
What is that supposed to mean? Am I interpreting this correctly that there will never be a way of completely disabling cloud access? I DON'T WANT MY SPEAKERS TO BE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE! THEY SHOULD STAY WITHIN MY NETWORK!
Mod Edit: Removed profanity.
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
You mean like the S1 system? :-)
A little more seriously, making the old app available would be a temporary solution, until the new app is something that can be called feature-complete. You could even timebomb it, so that it is not functional after, say, Nov 1st.
The appropriate way forward here seems pretty clear and obvious:
Say that you are sorry.
Roll back the app.
Have an open preview for the new app, until it's ready for general release.
Shut down the web player until the security risks are addressed.
Honestly, everybody wins. Every customer anyway. Why won't you do this? @tuckerseverson @DianeRoberts @KateW
What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?
@GuitarSuperstar
Thanks for asking. We have all been deeply invested in this project for a long time. We are all Sonos owners. Many people on the team had Sonos in their homes before they joined the team. We all use the experience every day.
Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music.
We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.
Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.” The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.
I've been looking at this AMA from the sideline. But this response sums it up for me.
The marketing BS bingo card is complete! Ding ding ding!
Do you expect these kind of responses fill us with trust? You expect us now to believe everything will be alright because the team is "energized"?
The new app left me without my carefully curated URL-based internet radio favorites. How is this supposed to be accomplished in the new app?
To add radio stations via a custom url, you will need to add the station in the Tune-In app first. Then you can add this station as a favorite from the Tune-In app in Sonos. I hope that helps!
So, all the stations I already had nicely curated are lost, and need to be re-created from scratch? That’s going to be tedious.
Step 1 seems to imply going to TuneIn’s own app (outside of the Sonos app) to setup my URLs. Then, for step 2, I would return to the Sonos app and go to the TuneIn service within Sonos. Is that correct?
(TuneIn seems to support adding URLs only in their iOS/Android apps, not on desktop or web. This’ll be loads of fun, tracking down all my internet radio URLs and then copy/pasting them into the app on my phone.)
Hi @Absolute40 ,
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
That doesn’t matter. We just want something that works NOW, not in two or three months time. Split the app into S2/S3 and let us use the S2 version (16.1 release) untill the S3 has caught up with reliability and features to the S2 app. I’m sure most people at that point would be happy to upgrade to the S3 app.
You say it’s not going to take long for parity to occur, then feature disparity shouldn’t be that bad, especially since the disparity right now is in the S2’s favour.
On top of that, you’d negate most of the bad will you’ve accumulated for yourselves through this debacle.
Did you not learn anything from the events of the S1/S2 debacle?
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
Divergence is where we are today, and this divergence is why your userbase is up in arms! The new app is missing mission critical features that we have come to depend on in our daily lives!
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the dual-track apps is a long-term strategy, but
We should continue to be able to run the old app on all devices until the new app has a strict superset of the old app’s functionality, and you should hold off on making any firmware changes to your devices that break compatibility with the old app until the new app is feature complete.
If the gaps in the new app can be completely closed in the next few months you can then retire the old app and force a migration then. But forcing it now is vastly premature.
Hi AMA team! I almost always use my Sonos devices in groups, and with the new app, handling of group volumes is worse. Not only does it not change in real-time like the former app, you end up with a UI pop-up on top of the volume slider I am using to adjust the volume. See the video below of before and after. Will this be fixed in a future app update?
@mdpeterman
A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely. Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.
Thank you for sharing the videos. I will make sure the team sees these so that we can continue to iterate and improve in upcoming releases.
Why should users care about which APi’s you are using? Such arguments are typical for software dev kids, but seeing this from Senior Director of Software Development…. No words.
I want to downgrade to S1. But that isn't possible with the latest version and when trying with 16.1 it says I need the latest version.
At least S1 including its app worked (and isn't accessible via the internet ).
Hopefully downgrading back to S1 is added soon.
I think (and hope) you mean S2. S1 is the old original app now used by owners of legacy products. Because Sonos loves creating legacy products.
Moving forward…
it’s getting exhausting, reading all of these comments, most of which I agree with. This is what I’d like to see going forward:
- a true apology from the leaders of this company for the app debacle
- A sincere promise that this same thing won’t happen again in the future
- A list, posted on the Sonos forum, showing all the requests that users have made to restore functions and for new functions, to show Sonos is aware of what users really want. If something a user wants isn’t included on the list, they could post a comment in a dedicated thread to add to the list in a constructive fashion.
@Sam_5Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.
But, @KateW - why release it before it was ready? You must admit that a product without feature parity is a regression. Regardless of the glowing future that awaits.
You could have Beta’d this for another month and launched in a much more solid position. Maybe with some of these new cloud services.
Some of your customers / users also work in the industry and know what goes on, regarding technology debt, re-factoring, etc.
Frankly not owning this situation - especially to those of us who are looking at this objectively - not great, really not great.
I’ve only observed up till now. There are only three respondents to, what — 400 users here ? While the Sonos replies are too few and too infrequent, they each generate further exponential posts, many just to get in a snarky response. This was never going to work. There have been plenty of pertinent questions posed, but also far too much mud-slinging which was never going to add anything. Maybe next time, a different platform for the Q&A, and hopefully a few more adults in the room.
I think if they would have come out and apologized right away and then laid out some semblance of a plan to make it right - they could have changed this trajectory quickly.
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
I understand this. What I don’t understand is, why you don’t roll back the new app completely, give us the old app back, work on the new one for another 6-12 months and only release it when UAT shows that it really is quicker, feature complete and stable?
I know it’s all about shareholder value, however isn’t the best way to boost that by building a really good product?
Feature Request: Please add the ability to customize the “currently playing” screen. It currently shows the album/station cover and a few tags, but it would be nice to be able to customize which ones are shown (tags like composer, album artist, etc).
Also, please (re)add the ability to make it full screen for display purposes with a tablet landscape mode like the previous version had. Thank you!
Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?
Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.
Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?
Hi @Absolute40 ,
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.
There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience.
It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.
I don’t think anybody is asking for you to support the old app forever, but if you’re going to force an update like this, even though you know you’re removing many features that have been there for years, then you need to give customers an option to wait it out.
These responses make it seem like you had no choice to push out this half finished app and you don’t care at all about your customers. I haven’t seen a single apology or anything from Sonos that acknowledges this was a bad idea. Just corporate BS about how much work it was to get this app half finished before you pushed it out to the world and you’ll get around to making work as well as the old one at some point in the future. Nobody cares what API technologies you’re using in the background if they can’t use the app.
Let’s talk about screen equity.
This is from my wall-mounted iPad.
Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?
Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.
Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?
Hi @Absolute40 ,
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.
There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience.
It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.
One thing there, having some fonctionality ( NAS playback) in the event my internet goes down is cool. Please make sure it fallback as gracefully as possible in that case.
@DianeRoberts: Can you please provide some details on what Cloud Services look like for Users who use Local Libraries? I hope that if there is an Internet outage that Local Music will be able to be played to a Local Sonos speaker.
No App or Device should get in the way of playing Local Music to a Local Sonos Speaker.
Period.
Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?
Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.
Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?
Hi @Absolute40 ,
Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.
@DianeRobertsApps Highlighting and Bolding your statement as absolute nonsense! This is the exact situation you created by releasing this app in the state in which it was released.
The functionality diverged instantly.
One had functions. New one does not…
Sonos has left a large group of users with a “not fully support experience”
Another ridiculous argument. It is not a change! It is a DOWNGRADE WITHOUT NOTICE BEFORE DOWNLOAD!!!
@Sam_5Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.
I am very concerned with the lack of security. Specially since 90% of Sonos products have microphones built-in. All these speakers are now exposed to the web https://play.sonos.com. At minimum add 2FA before someone gets any funny ideas.
So, if the Sonos web app, and the devices behind it aren’t secure, we’re looking at a massive vulnerability.
Wondering if Sonos informed their insurers before they exposed all their customers (without warning or consent) to whatever their cybersecurity measurers are.
Given we know what Sonos’s software engineering practices are… (rushes to unplug everything)
@KateW
When the app was getting ready to be released, what were your personal feelings regarding the new app?
Did you anticipate that it would be so poorly received?
@Sam_5Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.
In this case the negative feeling isn’t because of change, it’s because YOU BROKE STUFF OR OMMITTED FEATURES.
If everything had been present and 100% working, you may have gotten grumbles, but you wouldn’t have pissed off a good portion of your user base.
The sooner you understand and accept the difference, the sooner we’ll actually be able to get somewhere.
@KateW
When the app was getting ready to be released, what were your personal feelings regarding the new app?
Did you anticipate that it would be so poorly received?
@Sam_5Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.
On top of “the nature of change,” many people are upset by specific problems, the huge majority of which you’ve failed to address here, in a forum with no purpose but for you to address them.
This response is insulting, as most of Sonos’ posts in this thread have been. We get that you can’t talk like normal people here, but this could not have gone worse for you.
).